VLC Positioning Using Cameras with Unknown Tilting Angles

Prior visible-light communication (VLC) positioning systems require the receiver to be placed towards a certain angle, or extra sensors like gyroscopes must be equipped to estimate the angle of the receiver. In this work, we propose a positioning scheme using cameras based on angle difference of arrival (ADOA). ADOA-based positioning does not need the receiver to know its tilting angle, and the position estimation is modeled as a three-variate optimization problem in a finite search region, which is tractable in most smart devices. Our experimental and numerical results show that the ADOA-based VLC positioning scheme achieves accuracy of centimeters and the average cost time is as low as 0.2 seconds.