CALC: Calibration for Ambient Light Correction in Screen-to-Camera Visible Light Communication

Abstract

Screen-to-Camera Visible Light Communication (S2C-VLC) offers an attractive alternative to other near-field communication methods. It provides direct communication between smartphones without infrastructure support and demand on radio frequency while preserving privacy. However, ambient light variations can significantly impact the transmission rate and error rate of the S2C-VLC. In this paper, we first study the impact of ambient light conditions on S2C-VLC and evaluate the performance of a S2C-VLC system through experiments carried out under various ambient light conditions. Then, we propose a calibration approach called CALC: Calibration for Ambient Light Correction to minimize these errors due to the variations in ambient light. Our results show that CALC can achieve a nearly zero bit error rate for CSK-8 with block sizes of 18 × 18 or larger and 418 Kbps transmission rate with a 13 × 13 block size at the cost of a higher bit error rate.

Keywords

• Visible light communication
• Screen-to-camera communication
• Ambient light