Positioning Using Visible Light Communications: A Perspective Arcs Approach

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel perspective arcs approach for indoor positioning using visible light communication, leveraging luminaire geometry and coordinate data to achieve high accuracy without inertial sensors.

Contribution

It proposes a new perspective arcs method utilizing luminaire geometry and VLC data, improving indoor positioning accuracy and robustness against occlusion.

Findings

Achieves around 10 cm accuracy in simulations.

Experimental prototype attains less than 5 cm average accuracy.

Proposes algorithms effective with partial and blocked luminaires.

Abstract

Visible light positioning (VLP) is an accurate indoor positioning technology that uses luminaires as transmitters. In particular, circular luminaires are a common source type for VLP, that are typically treated only as point sources for positioning, while ignoring their geometry characteristics. In this paper, the arc feature of the circular luminaire and the coordinate information obtained via visible light communication (VLC) are jointly used for VLC-enabled indoor positioning, and a novel perspective arcs approach is proposed. The proposed approach does not rely on any inertial measurement unit, and has no tilted angle limitations at the user. First, a VLC assisted perspective circle and arc algorithm (V-PCA) is proposed for a scenario in which a complete luminaire and an incomplete one can be captured by the user. Considering the cases in which parts of VLC links are blocked, an anti-occlusion VLC assisted perspective arcs algorithm (OA-V-PA) is proposed. Simulation results show that the proposed indoor positioning algorithm can achieve a 95th percentile positioning accuracy of around 10 cm. Moreover, an experimental prototype based on mobile phone is implemented, in which, a fused image processing method is proposed. Experimental results show that the average positioning accuracy is less than 5 cm.