Long-Distance, Real-Time LED Display-Camera Communication System Based on LED Point Clustering and Lightweight Image Processing

LED displays can be used to realize the dual functions of display and communication simultaneously. However, existing LED display-based visible light communication (VLC) systems suffer due to their short transmission distance and are not practical. A long-distance, real-time display-camera communication (DCC) system is proposed in this paper. First, a LED-DCC point clustering scheme is proposed to increase the transmission distance by clustering multiple adjacent LED display points for improving the quality of the VLC signal captured by an image sensor. Then, a lightweight, back-forth, fast image processing algorithm is proposed to reduce the introduced additional computational complexity caused by point clustering and enhance the reliability of information extraction from the real-time captured images/video frames. The experimental system was implemented with a 2.2-inch 16 × 16 point LED display and the CMOS camera on the smartphone. Experimental results show that the proposed system can achieve a maximum data transmission distance of 7 m under a bit error rate (BER) of 0.5, which is about 9 times that of the previous LED-DCC system, and can achieve a data transmission distance of 175 cm under the 7% forward error correction (FEC) limit, which is about 12 times that of the previous LED-DCC system. Additionally, the decoding latency for extracting information from each video frame is only 13.26 ms, which guarantees real-time data reception.