Performance enhancement of optical camera communication system using optical camera communication coding and region‐of‐interest detection

Abstract

Abstract Optical camera communication (OCC) is considered an important transmission scheme in implementing indoor navigation, beacons, and other Internet of Things applications. One of the disadvantages of OCC, however, is that transmission is successful only if the line‐of‐sight requirement is satisfied between transmitting LED lamps and receiving image sensors. Any obstacle between them or movement of the receiver direction causes a reduction in the light signal and leads to a burst error, and its compensation is not easy. A low‐density parity check (LDPC) code is employed in the OCC to overcome burst error. To improve the performance further, a region of interest area detection is proposed that utilizes only the centre part of an image frame for LDPC decoding rather than using the whole area measurement. The LDPC codes are tested using an appropriate OCC packet structure, and its performance is compared with that of polar codes. The experimental results indicate that LDPC coding is more suitable in OCC systems. It is found that the proposed LDPC coding scheme not only recovers the data from burst errors but also enhances the transmission distance. In particular, soft‐decision LDPC decoding shows more resistance to burst errors and bit loss.

Keywords

• LED lamps
• parity check codes
• cameras
• decoding
• free‐space optical communication
• polar codes