High-speed optical camera V2V communications using selective capture

Abstract

Optical camera communication (OCC) can be considered a convenient and versatile short-range communication technology within the framework of optical wireless communications. As OCC suffers from low data transmission rate in comparison with very high-speed modulation of light emitting diodes (LEDs), it imposes major limitations on an optical camera-based vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication. This paper presents an OCC-based high-speed V2V using a distinct capturing strategy called selective capture (SC). Experiments were performed to verify the proposed SC-based V2V based on a Raspberry Pi camera module (RaspiCam). The SC was performed with template matching technique on the RaspiCam module. The module enables both the selection of resolution and the capturing of vehicle taillights only from the full camera capture frame. As the transmitter, a $$4\times 4$$ red LED array was employed as the taillights of a vehicle. It is found that the use of SC to capture the taillights effectively increases the capture speed of RaspiCam from 120 frames per second (fps) to 435 fps, yielding an efficient and high-speed V2V with flicker-free taillights. In addition, the proposed SC-V2V with increased capture speed provides a data rate of up to 3.456 kbps and achieves acceptable bit error rate performance at a distance of up to 175 cm.