Indoor Positioning with Mobile Phones and Visible Light
Ye-Sheng Kuo, Pat Pannuto, Ko-Jen Hsiao, Prabal Dutta

Citation
Ye-Sheng Kuo, Pat Pannuto, Ko-Jen Hsiao, Prabal Dutta. "Indoor Positioning with Mobile Phones and Visible Light". ACM MobiCom: The 20th Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking, ACM, 7, September, 2014.

Abstract
We explore the indoor positioning problem with unmodified smartphones and slightly-modified commercial LED luminaries. The luminaries, modified to allow rapid, on-off keying, transmit their identifiers and/or locations encoded in human-imperceptible optical pulses. A camera-equipped smartphone, using just a single camera image frame capture, can detect the presence of the luminaires in the image, decode their transmitted identifiers and/or locations, and determine the smartphone's location and orientation relative to the luminaires. The key insights underlying this work are (i) the driver circuits of emerging LED lighting systems can be trivially modified to transmit data through on-off keying; (ii) the rolling shutter effect of CMOS imagers, which normally results in motion blur, can be leveraged to receive many bits of data encoded in the optical transmissions with just a single frame capture, (iii) a camera is intrinsically an angle-ofarrival sensor, so the projection of multiple light sources with known positions onto a camera's image plane can be framed as an instance of a sufficiently-constrained angle-of-arrival localization problem, and (iv) this problem can be solved with optimization techniques. We explore the feasibility of the design through an analytical model, demonstrate the viability of the design through a prototype system, identify the challenges to a practical deployment including lighting density and camera constraints, and offer suggestions to better support such indoor positioning schemes through simple enhancements to smartphone APIs.

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Citation formats  
  • HTML
    Ye-Sheng Kuo, Pat Pannuto, Ko-Jen Hsiao, Prabal Dutta. <a
    href="http://www.terraswarm.org/pubs/304.html"
    >Indoor Positioning with Mobile Phones and Visible
    Light</a>, ACM MobiCom: The 20th Annual International
    Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking, ACM, 7,
    September, 2014.
  • Plain text
    Ye-Sheng Kuo, Pat Pannuto, Ko-Jen Hsiao, Prabal Dutta.
    "Indoor Positioning with Mobile Phones and Visible
    Light". ACM MobiCom: The 20th Annual International
    Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking, ACM, 7,
    September, 2014.
  • BibTeX
    @inproceedings{KuoPannutoHsiaoDutta14_IndoorPositioningWithMobilePhonesVisibleLight,
        author = {Ye-Sheng Kuo and Pat Pannuto and Ko-Jen Hsiao and
                  Prabal Dutta},
        title = {Indoor Positioning with Mobile Phones and Visible
                  Light},
        booktitle = {ACM MobiCom: The 20th Annual International
                  Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking},
        organization = {ACM},
        day = {7},
        month = {September},
        year = {2014},
        abstract = {We explore the indoor positioning problem with
                  unmodified smartphones and slightly-modified
                  commercial LED luminaries. The luminaries,
                  modified to allow rapid, on-off keying, transmit
                  their identifiers and/or locations encoded in
                  human-imperceptible optical pulses. A
                  camera-equipped smartphone, using just a single
                  camera image frame capture, can detect the
                  presence of the luminaires in the image, decode
                  their transmitted identifiers and/or locations,
                  and determine the smartphone's location and
                  orientation relative to the luminaires. The key
                  insights underlying this work are (i) the driver
                  circuits of emerging LED lighting systems can be
                  trivially modified to transmit data through on-off
                  keying; (ii) the rolling shutter effect of CMOS
                  imagers, which normally results in motion blur,
                  can be leveraged to receive many bits of data
                  encoded in the optical transmissions with just a
                  single frame capture, (iii) a camera is
                  intrinsically an angle-ofarrival sensor, so the
                  projection of multiple light sources with known
                  positions onto a camera's image plane can be
                  framed as an instance of a
                  sufficiently-constrained angle-of-arrival
                  localization problem, and (iv) this problem can be
                  solved with optimization techniques. We explore
                  the feasibility of the design through an
                  analytical model, demonstrate the viability of the
                  design through a prototype system, identify the
                  challenges to a practical deployment including
                  lighting density and camera constraints, and offer
                  suggestions to better support such indoor
                  positioning schemes through simple enhancements to
                  smartphone APIs.},
        URL = {http://terraswarm.org/pubs/304.html}
    }
    

Posted by Barb Hoversten on 21 Apr 2014.
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