Influence of Camera Framerate Variations on an Optical Camera Communication System

Light Emitting Diodes (LED) equipment is used primarily just for lighting, but Visible Light Communication (VLC) is a new research domain that uses existing LED infrastructure for transmitting data, intelligent road traffic signaling, positioning, guiding inside buildings, etc. Most proposed VLC techniques use light sensors as receivers, but they are not readily available in devices that we use every day, or their sample rate is too low. A branch of VLC is represented by optical camera communications (OCC), where a video camera is the receiver, which, unlike a fast sampled light sensor, is available on any smartphone. Because of the operating system, there could be a variation in the framerate of video smartphone cameras while recording. This paper presents first stage simulations of such an indoor navigation system based on OCC, coupling together LED lights as sources with widely available modern smartphone cameras as receivers. The proposed experiments investigate the influences of camera framerate variation from the nominal value on the decoding performances of our OCC system and show that it can be used in real world conditions.