Mono Camera-Based Optical Vehicular Communication for an Advanced Driver Assistance System

This technical paper proposes a new waveform combining the low-rate and high-rate data streams to detect the region-of-interest signal in a high-mobility environment using optical camera communication. The proposed technique augments the bit rate of the low-rate stream; consequently, the link setup time is reduced and the requirement of low frame rate camera is eliminated. Additionally, both the low-rate and high-rate data streams in the proposed bi-level pulse position modulation are decoded with a unique adaptive thresholding mechanism with a high frame rate camera. We also propose a vehicle localization scheme to assist the drivers in maintaining a safe following distance that can significantly reduce the frequency of accidents. Moreover, two neural networks are proposed to detect the light-emitting diodes (LEDs) for localization and communication, and to estimate the road curvature from different rear LED shapes of the forwarding vehicle, respectively. The system is implemented, and its performance is analyzed in Python 3.7. The implementation results show that the proposed system is able to achieve 75% localization accuracy, a 150 bps low-rate stream, and a 600 bps high-rate stream over a range of 25 m with a commercial 30 fps camera.