A Preliminary Investigation For Event Camera-Based Visible Light Communication Using The Propeller-type Rotary LED Transmitter

Abstract

This study investigates a new communication scheme for the event camera-based visible light communication (VLC) using a propeller-type rotary LED transmitter. Conventional camera-based VLC suffers from low data rates and high latency due to the limited camera frame rates. To solve this problem, the event camera has been used as the receiver in VLC. Event cameras detect changes in brightness and asynchronously output these changes as events in microsecond order. The high temporal resolution gives the event camera-based VLC good potential in terms of high speed and low latency. However, when an event camera is used as the VLC receiver, the light of the transmitter needs to be changed constantly. If the transmitter LED is continuously in the same blinking state, the event camera may not output any events and the data could not be recovered until the blinking state changes. To transmit the optical signal for event cameras, we use a propeller-type rotary LED transmitter, which is under development, for the event camera-based VLC. The transmitter rotates the blinking LED in circles and uses the afterimage of LED light to transmit signals. The event camera detects the afterimages and constantly outputs them as a stream of events. We filter the noise events and recover data using signal events. This study verifies the operation for the proposed system through an implementation experiment. As a result, we achieved the communication in the proposed system and provided a basic evaluation of communication quality.