Computer Vision-Based Localization With Visible Light Communications

Visible light positioning and computer vision-based localization have the potential to be cost-effective technologies for accurate indoor localization. However, the feasibility of existing methods in this domain is limited. In this paper, a novel visible light communication (VLC)-assisted perspective-four-line algorithm (V-P4L) is proposed for practical indoor localization. The basic idea of V-P4L is to jointly use VLC and computer vision techniques to achieve high localization accuracy regardless of LED height differences. In particular, the space-domain information is first exploited to estimate the orientation and coordinate information of a single rectangular LED luminaire in the camera coordinate system based on plane geometry theory and solid geometry theory. Then, by using time-domain information transmitted by VLC and the estimated luminaire information, the proposed V-P4L can estimate the position and pose of the camera using single-view geometry theory and the linear least square (LLS) method. To further mitigate the effect of height differences among LEDs on localization accuracy, a correction algorithm based on the LLS method and a simple optimization method is proposed. Due to the combination of time- and space-domain information, V-P4L can achieve accurate localization using a single luminaire without limitation on the correspondences between the features and their projections in conventional perspective-n-line (PnL) algorithms. Simulation results show that the position error caused by the proposed V-P4L algorithm is always less than 15 cm and the orientation error is always less than 4 degrees using popular indoor luminaires. Experimental results with real hardware show that the average position error is less than 3 cm under both similar and different heights for the LEDs.