Visible Light Positioning With Visual Odometry: A Single Luminaire Based Positioning Algorithm

Visible light positioning (VLP) is an accurate and low-cost positioning technique. However, existing VLP algorithms require multiple luminaires or multiple sensors to achieve the desired positioning accuracy, which may not be satisfied in practice. To circumvent this challenge, a novel visual odometry (VO) assisted VLP algorithm (VO-VLP) is proposed, which can achieve accurate positioning using only a single luminaire at the transmitter and a single camera at the receiver. In the considered model, the luminaires are equipped on the ceiling and consistently broadcast coordinate information of the luminaires by visible light communication (VLC). A user equipped with a camera captures photos of the ceiling so as to locate its position via VO-VLP. In particular, VO-VLP first uses the single luminaire’s circle feature and VLC information to obtain the pose and location of the user. However, there are dual solutions due to the limited received information in the single-luminaire scenario and the symmetry of the circular luminaire. Then, we propose a duality elimination method to eliminate the wrong one by introducing VO to exploit the visual features on the ceiling in two consecutive images, which are captured when the user moves. To verify the feasibility of our designed VO-VLP, a prototype is implemented. A cooperative multi-information image processing method is proposed for the prototype to ensure that the VLC information and the visual information of the luminaire and the ceiling can be simultaneously received for real-time positioning. Simulations and experiments are conducted to prove that VO-VLP can achieve accurate positioning with only a single luminaire and a camera without any extra sensors, such as an inertial measurement unit. In particular, simulation results show that the proposed indoor positioning algorithm can achieve a 97% positioning accuracy of around 10 cm, and experimental results show that the average positioning accuracy is less than 10 cm.