Towards High-Speed Passive Visible Light Communication with Event Cameras and Digital Micro-Mirrors

TL;DR

This paper presents a novel passive VLC system using event cameras and DMDs, enabling parallel decoding of thousands of channels and achieving significantly higher data rates than previous methods.

Contribution

It introduces a massive spatial data channel framework with event processing algorithms, enabling high-speed passive VLC with parallel decoding capabilities.

Findings

Decodes up to ~2,000 channels simultaneously

Achieves data rates of 1.6 Mbps

Surpasses previous benchmarks by 16 times

Abstract

Passive visible light communication (VLC) modulates light propagation or reflection to transmit data without directly modulating the light source. Thus, passive VLC provides an alternative to conventional VLC, enabling communication where the light source cannot be directly controlled. There have been ongoing efforts to explore new methods and devices for modulating light propagation or reflection. The state-of-the-art has broken the 100 kbps data rate barrier for passive VLC by using a digital micro-mirror device (DMD) as the light modulating platform, or transmitter, and a photo-diode as the receiver. We significantly extend this work by proposing a massive spatial data channel framework for DMDs, where individual channels can be decoded in parallel using an event camera at the receiver. For the event camera, we introduce event processing algorithms to detect numerous channels and decode bits from individual channels with high reliability. Our prototype, built with off-the-shelf event cameras and DMDs, can decode up to $\sim$2,000 parallel channels, achieving a data transmission rate of 1.6 Mbps, markedly surpassing current benchmarks by 16x.