FoVLC: Foveation Based Data Hiding in Display Transmitters for Visible Light Communications

Visible light communications is an emerging architecture with unlicensed and huge bandwidth resources, security, and experimental implementations and standardization efforts. Display based transmitter and camera based receiver architectures are alternatives for device-to-device (D2D) and home area networking (HAN) systems by utilizing widely available TV, tablet and mobile phone screens as transmitters while commercially available cameras as receivers. Current architectures utilizing data hiding and unobtrusive steganography methods promise data transmission without user distraction on the screen. however, current architectures have challenges with the limited capability of data hiding in translucency or color shift based methods of hiding by uniformly distributing modulation throughout the screen and keeping eye discomfort at an acceptable level. In this article, foveation property of human visual system is utilized to define a novel modulation method denoted by FoVLC which adaptively improves data hiding capability throughout the screen based on the current eye focus point of viewer. Theoretical modeling of modulation and demodulation mechanisms hiding data in color shifts of pixel blocks is provided while experiments are performed for both FoVLC method and uniform data hiding denoted as conventional method. Experimental tests for the simple design as a proof of concept decreases average bit error rate (BER) to approximately half of the value obtained with the conventional method without user distraction while promising future efforts for optimizing block sizes and utilizing error correction codes.