Smartphone Camera Based Visible Light Communication

The paper proposes a novel camera-based receiver for visible light communications for a short range mobile-to-mobile communications link. The receiver captures data from the screen of a transmitting smartphone and uses the speeded up robust features algorithm to effectively detect it. The receiver performs a projective transformation to accurately eliminate perspective distortions caused by the displacement of the devices. The paper also introduces a quantization process in order to suppress the inter-symbol interference resulting from the dynamic nature of the environment. A range of experiments are carried out in order to evaluate the system performance when the position parameters are varied. We show that the proposed system is capable of achieving a very high success rate of 98% in recovering the transmitted images under test conditions.