Two-Dimensional Coding for Optical Camera

Communication using CMOS Sensors

Trong-Hop Do Myungsik Yoo

School of Electronic Engineering School of Electronic Engineering
Soongsil University, South Korea Soongsil University, South Korea

Abstract—This paper proposes a two-dimensional coding in

optical camera communication (OOC) using CMOS sensors.
Traditionally, OOC exploits the rolling shutter effect of CMOS
sensors to create horizontal bands which convey the information
along one dimension of the image. The proposed coding uses
multiple vertical LED panels to convey the information in two
dimensions of the image and thus the data rate is drastically
increased. The effectiveness of the proposed coding is confirmed
through simulations.

I. I NTRODUCTION
There are two main techniques in optical camera commu-
nication (OOC). The first one is high speed OOC using LED Fig. 1: Image acquisition in a CMOS sensor
arrays and high speed cameras [1]. As the name suggest, this
type of OOC uses high speed cameras to capture typically
several thousands of LED array images per second to achieve
in the sensor. During the exposure period of the whole image,
high data rates. Despite of the clear advantage of high data
turning on and off the LED light would result in white and
rate, this technique has drawbacks regarding to the complexity
black horizontal bands which represent bit 1 and 0 as illustrated
of the software and especially the cost of the hardware.
in Fig. 1. It can be seen that with the traditional method, the
The second technique is low speed OOC using low speed
data is only encoded along the vertical dimension of the image.
CMOS sensor cameras [2]. Although having the advantage of
simplicity and low cost, this technique has not gained much
attentions from researchers due to the low data rate it provides.
More specifically, in traditional OOC using CMOS sensor
cameras, the rolling shutter effect of CMOS sensors is utilized
to create horizontal black and white bands which convey bit
0 and 1 in the image of a single LED (or a single LED panel
consists of multiple LED chips modulated in the same way).
As analyzed in [2], the theoretical limitation in data rate of
this technique with typical hardware is 32 Kbit/s.
In this paper, a two-dimensional coding method is proposed
for OOC using CMOS sensor with the purpose of improving
the data rate of the traditional technique. More specifically,
instead of using a single LED panel as in the traditional
technique, the proposed technique uses a horizontal array
of vertical LED panels to encode the information in both
vertical and horizontal dimension of the image. Compared to
traditional techniques of OOC using CMOS sensor, the pro-
posed technique has the complexity of the software increased,
the cost remained the same, and most importantly the data
rate drastically increased. The proposed coding is confirmed
through simulations. Fig. 2: Proposed coding

II. S YSTEM ARCHITECTURE AND PROPOSED CODING

The proposed coding method is described in Fig. 2. A
CMOS sensor uses the rolling shutter mechanism for image horizontal LED array which consists of multiple vertical LED
acquisition. The exposure and data readout occur row by row panels is used as the transmitter. Each vertical LED panel
consists of multiple LED chips that transmit the same high
frequency signal. The signals transmitted from different ver-
tical LED panels are different. When the whole LED array
is captured by a CMOS sensor camera, the rolling shutter
effect creates vertical stripes of which each consists of multiple
horizontal bands as illustrated in Fig. 2. Consequently, the data
rate is effectively multiplied by the number of vertical LED
panels in the LED array.

III. S IMULATION
(a) ISO = 100, exposure time = 1/200s, LED frequency = 100Hz, Data
The system is simulated in Matlab. In the simulation, the rate = 2 Kbits/s
LED array is assumed to consist of 20 vertical LED panel. All
simulation parameters are listed in Table I.

TABLE I: Simulation environment.

Parameter Value
Sensor physical size 36 × 24 (mm2 )
Sensor resolution 3600 × 2400 (pixels)
Lens focal length 100 (mm)
Readout time 0.05 (s)
LED luminance 16,384 (cd/m2 )
ISO 100 and 800
(b) ISO = 800, exposure time = 1/32000s, LED frequency = 30000Hz,
Lens aperture 4 Data rate = 0.6 Mbits/s
Exposure time 1/200s and 1/32000 s
LED frequency 100Hz and 30 kHz Fig. 3: Simulation results
Number of vertical LED panels 20

The simulation is conducted with different setting to simu-
late the captured image of the LED array in different scenarios
and the results are shown in Fig. 3. In the first scenario, the
low LED frequency of 100 Hz is used and the exposure time
is 1/200s. The simulated image is shown in Fig. 3(a). Since
the data rate provided by each vertical LED panel equals the
LED frequency, the total data rate achieved in this scenario is
2 Kbit/s. In the second scenario, the high LED frequency of
30000 Hz is used. It is important to note that to use such a
high frequency of LED, the exposure time must be very high.
More specifically, the exposure time must be smaller than the
reciprocal of the LED frequency. Therefore, an exposure time
of 1/32000s is used in the simulation. Because the exposure
time is short, the ISO needs to be increase from 100 to 800 to
amplify the received light. The simulated image in this scenario
is shown in Fig. 3(b). As can be seen intuitively, the achievable
data rate of the second scenario is much higher than that of
the first one. To be more precise, the data rate in this scenario
is 0.6 Mbit/s. However, the tradeoff for the increase of high
data rate is the decrease of signal quality. Since the bands in
the image is very thin now, it is easy for them to be detected
wrongly in the processing step and thus the BER would be
increase. Therefore, in real application, this tradeoff needs to
be considered to give the balance between the data rate and
BER. After all, the simulations show that data rate can be
significantly increase by the proposed coding.
IV. C ONCLUSION
This paper proposes a two-dimensional coding for optical
camera communication using CMOS sensors. Different to the
traditional technique that encodes the data in only vertical
dimension of the image, the proposed coding encodes the data
in both vertical and horizontal dimension of the image by using
a horizontal array of vertical LED panels. The benefit of the
proposed coding is that the data rate is drastically increased.
The effectiveness of the proposed coding is confirmed by
simulations.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This research was supported by Basic Science Research
Program through the National Research Foundation of Korea
(NRF) funded by the Ministry of Education, Science and
Technology (No. 2015R1A2A2A01006431).
R EFERENCES
[1] Iwasaki, Shinya, et al. ”Visible light road-to-vehicle communication
using high-speed camera.” Intelligent Vehicles Symposium, 2008 IEEE.
IEEE, 2008.
[2] Do, Trong-Hop, and Myungsik Yoo. ”Performance analysis of visible
light communication using CMOS sensors.” Sensors 16, no. 3 (2016):
309.