Design and analysis of an optical camera communication system for underwater applications

The growing interest in underwater explorations has stimulated considerable interest in advancing the enabling technologies of underwater wireless communication (UWC) systems. The study presents the design and implementation techniques of a short-range unidirectional UWC system which uses optical camera communication (OCC) principles. OCC systems have light emitting diodes at the transmitter, with the receiver being a camera. Overall system design considerations, synchronisation and frame selection, and a novel spatial position-based image processing algorithm to decode data from frames are discussed. Also, the optimisation techniques used in the image processing algorithm are also elaborated. Importance of few of key features of an OCC system, namely camera quality, transmission distance and the threshold value used for image binarisation are demonstrated through numerical results using simulations via synthetically generated images. Further, the bit error rate (BER) performance of the system is evaluated using the experimental proof of concept setup in clear water, muddy water and under turbulence conditions. Overall BER performance in the order of 10 -3 within the communication distance of 1 m is observed, and it shows that the proposed system design and algorithms can be used to realise an UWC link for short-range applications successfully.