Foundational analysis of spatial optical wireless communication utilizing image sensor

The rapid developments of the image sensor technology have made them an important tool in different areas. Many applications utilizing image sensors were proposed. In recent years, there is a tendency to utilize light-emitting diodes (LED) as a light source replacing normal lamps due to its obvious advantages over incandescent light sources, which including lower energy consumption, longer lifetime, improved robustness, smaller size, faster switching, and greater reliability. It is also being used as a transmitter of optical wireless communication (OWC). Therefore, application using LED and image sensor as transmitter and receiver respectively becomes an attractive option for the imaging system. Wireless communication utilizing image sensor is an intercross research of imaging technology and communication technology, few researches have been conducted to implement image sensors in OWC systems. In this paper, we systematically introduce the image sensor communication (ISC) technology and provide important theoretical analysis on the proposed system. A new method of region detection using size, shape matching is proposed. Furthermore the communication signal recovering algorithms for OWC utilizing image sensor is presented.