High Speed LED-to-Camera Communication using Color Shift Keying with Flicker Mitigation

Abstract

LED-to-camera communication allows LEDs deployed for illumination purposes to modulate and transmit data which can be received by camera sensors available in mobile devices like smartphones, wearable smart-glasses, etc. Such communication has a unique property that a user can visually identify a transmitter (i.e., LED) and specifically receive information from the transmitter. It can support a variety of novel applications such as augmented reality through mobile devices, navigation using smart signs, fine-grained location specific advertisement, etc. However, the achievable data rate in current LED-to-camera communication techniques remains very low to support any practical application. In this paper, we present ColorBars, an LED-to-camera communication system that utilizes Color Shift Keying (CSK) to modulate data using different colors transmitted by the LED. It exploits the increasing popularity of Tri-LEDs (RGB) that can emit a wide range of colors. We show that commodity cameras can efficiently and accurately demodulate the color symbols. ColorBars ensures flicker-free and reliable communication even in the presence of inter-frame loss and diversity of rolling shutter cameras. We implement ColorBars on embedded platform and evaluate it with Android and iOS smartphones as receivers. Our evaluation shows that ColorBars can achieve a data rate of 7.7 Kbps on Nexus 5, 3.7 Kbps on iPhone 5S, and 2.9 Kbps on Samsung Note8. It is also shown that lower CSK modulations (e.g., four and eight CSK) provide extremely low symbol error rates (<; 10 <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">-3</sup> ), making them a desirable choice for reliable LED-to-camera communication.