Enhancing Computational Efficiency in Event-Based Optical Camera Communication Using N-Pulse Modulation

Abstract

Event cameras are bio-inspired devices that have revolutionized the acquisition of visual information by mimicking the neural architecture of the eye. These cameras respond asynchronously to changes in scene illumination at the pixel level, providing high-precision time information with low latency, typically in the order of microseconds. In this work, we experimentally evaluate an optical camera communication (OCC) link using an LED-based transmitter and an event camera as the receiver. We propose n-pulse modulation to encode data, adapting the system to the specific characteristics and operational principles of event cameras. The proposed scheme significantly reduces the demodulation complexity compared to other alternatives found in the literature. Furthermore, a set of experiments considering different camera bias sensitivities, encoding duty cycles, and LED radiant fluxes were carried out. The results showed that the BER performance was strongly dependent on the received optical power and the bias sensitivity. In addition, duty cycles between 0.3 and 0.7 at a 200 Hz transmission frequency presented the best performance, with a BER below 1.25×10−4, which is under the forward error correction (FEC) limit. This work showcases the cutting-edge capabilities of event-camera-based OCC technology and contributes to the ongoing revolution in optical wireless communication (OWC).