Transition-based Data Decoding for Optical Camera Communications Using a Rolling Shutter Camera

Rolling shutter operation of CMOS cameras can be utilized in optical camera communications in order to transmit data from an LED to mobile devices such as smart-phones. From temporally modulated light, a spatial flicker pattern is obtained in the captured image, and this is used for signal recovery. Due to the degradation of rolling shutter images caused by light smear, motion blur, and focus blur, the conventional decoding schemes for rolling shutter cameras based on the pattern width for ‘OFF’ and ‘ON’ cannot guarantee robust communications performance for practical uses. Aside from conventional techniques, such as polynomial fitting, histogram equalization can be used for blurry light mitigation, but it requires additional computation abilities resulting in burdens on mobile devices. This paper proposes a transition-based decoding scheme for rolling shutter cameras in order to offer simple and robust data decoding in the presence of image degradation. Based on the designed synchronization pulse and modulated data symbols according to the LED dimming level, the decoding process is conducted by observing the transition patterns of two sequential symbol pulses. For this, the extended symbol pulse caused by consecutive symbol pulses with the same level determines whether the second pulse should be included for the next bit decoding or not. The proposed method simply identifies the transition patterns of sequential symbol pulses other than the pattern width of ‘OFF’ and ‘ON’ for data decoding, and thus, it is simpler and more accurate. Experimental results ensured that the transition-based decoding scheme is robust even in the presence of blurry lights in the captured image at various dimming levels.