Luminance Inversion for Parallel Transmission VLC between LCD and Image Sensor Camera

Luminance inversion (LI) is proposed to compensate for nonlinear characteristics between a liquid crystal display (LCD) and an image sensor (IS) camera of the parallel transmission (PT) visible light communication (VLC). In the PT system reported in [1], which incorporates N spatial frequencies with phase shift keying (PSK) through M-point inverse discrete Fourier transform (IDFT), data are transmitted from M different regions of pixels on an LCD spatially in parallel. Since the transfer characteristics between the LCD and IS camera is nonlinear, the received signal at IS camera receiver is distorted. The effect is severe because signals of the PT system are, in essence, the OFDM signal, thus suffering from high peak-to-average ratio (PAPR). To linearize it between the LCD and IS camera, our approach is to calculate a complement of the digital data fed to the driver of the pixel and then to feed the pair of the digital data and its complement to the driver during two successive frames. In the receiver, the difference of the signals during the two frames is calculated for each of the M detected regions on the IS plane, and then they input to the following M-point DFT in the PT system. By introducing this LI process, wider linear characteristics in the PT system is obtained than without LI. Experimental results show that the number of bits per frame that the PT system with LI can accommodate without any error is 315bits/frame and 100bits/frame for 8- and 16-PSK, which are much larger than 12bits/frame and 0bits/frame for the 8- and 16-PSK PT system without LI, respectively.