Visible Light Positioning Based on a Single Luminaire: A Novel Visual Odometry Assisted Algorithm

Visible light positioning (VLP) is a promising positioning technique, which, however, typically requires multiple luminaires to achieve accurate positioning. This paper proposes a novel visual odometry (VO) assisted visible light positioning algorithm (VO-VLP) in achieving positioning with only a single luminaire. In the considered model, a user equipped with a camera jointly uses geometric features in the captured images and coordinates information obtained via visible light communication (VLC) for positioning. The proposed VLP algorithm does not rely on any extra inertial measurement unit and relaxes the tilted angle limitation at the user. In particular, VO-VLP first uses the circle feature of a luminaire to obtain dual normal vectors of the luminaire. Then, the basic principle of VO is used to eliminate the wrong normal vector by exploiting the geometric features in two consecutive images captured when the user moves. Finally, the pose and location of the user are obtained by using an artificially marked point on the luminaire's contour. VO-VLP can achieve accurate positioning with only a single luminaire and a camera. Simulation results show that the proposed indoor positioning algorithm can achieve a 97th-percentile positioning accuracy of around 10 cm.