Vehicular Visible Light Communications with LED Taillight and Rolling Shutter Camera

Visible light communication (VLC) has recently emerged to become a promising wireless communication technology. Vehicle lights and traffic lights have started to utilize LEDs and due to their shorter response time, they can be easily modified to become VLC transmitters. In addition, cameras embedded in smartphones can be used as VLC receivers. As a result, Vehicular VLC (V2LC) between vehicle lighting and smartphone cameras has the potential to enable a great number of applications with low cost. In this paper, a prototype V2LC system that utilizes undersampled frequency shift ON-OFF keying (UFSOOK) modulation is proposed. The system utilizes rolling shutter cameras as the receiver and takes advantages of its characteristics to improve the receiving performance. An off- the-shelf vehicle LED taillight is used as the transmitter. Information is transmitted in the continuous state (ON-OFF) changes of LEDs which are invisible to human eyes. The performance evaluation results demonstrate that the communication prototype is robust and can resist common optical interferences and noises within the image.