Enhancing Optical Camera Communication Performance for Collaborative Communication Using Positioning Information

Optical camera communication (OCC) has emerged as a promising alternative technology for radio frequency (RF)-based communication systems. However, existing OCC approaches only consider transmitting data through broadcasting, without any ability for point-to-point communication. In this paper, a new modulation scheme termed distance color-coded on-off keying (DCC-OOK) is proposed that uses distance information retrieved from relative localization. The proposed method allows OCC to perform point-to-point communication and facilitates bidirectional communication. An OCC system that uses multi-sensor fusion of a camera and LiDAR is considered, in which calibration of the sensors and LED array segmentation for performing relative localization between the OCC transmitter and the OCC receiver are explained. The results indicate that both point-to-point and bidirectional communication were achieved with the proposed OCC system. During implementation, the distance between transmitter and receiver was varied between 1.0 and 4.0 m, and the system demonstrated a maximum data rate of 38.4 kbps with a lowest BER of 0.03.