Unmanned-aerial-vehicle based optical camera communication system using light-diffusing fiber and rolling-shutter image-sensor

Abstract

We put forward and demonstrate a light-diffusing fiber equipped unmanned-aerial-vehicle (UAV) to provide a large field-of-view (FOV) optical camera communication (OCC) system. The light-diffusing fiber can act as a bendable, lightweight, extended and large FOV light source for the UAV-assisted optical wireless communication (OWC). During UAV flying, the light-diffusing fiber light source could be tilted or bended; hence, offering large FOV as well as supporting large receiver (Rx) tilting angle are particularly important for the UAV-assisted OWC systems. To improve the transmission capacity of the OCC system, one method based on the camera shutter mechanism, which is known as rolling-shuttering is utilized. The rolling-shuttering method makes use of the feature of complementary-metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) image sensor to extract signal pixel-row by pixel-row. The data rate can be significantly increased since the capture start time for each pixel-row is different. As the light-diffusing fiber is thin and occupies only a few pixels in the CMOS image frame, Long-short-term-memory neural-network (LSTM-NN) is used to enhance the rolling-shutter decoding. Experimental results show that the light-diffusing fiber can satisfactorily act as an "omnidirectional optical antenna" providing wide FOVs and 3.6 kbit/s can be achieved, accomplishing the pre-forward error correction bit-error-rate (pre-FEC BER = 3.8 × 10^-3).