Implementation Experiment of a Rotary LED Transmitter for Improving the Transmission Rate for Image Sensor Communication

This study demonstrates a novel LED transmitter for image sensor communication (ISC) and describes its implementation experiment. In an ISC system, optical signals are transferred through the blinking of LEDs, and they are then captured using a camera. Due to the low frame rate of commercial cameras, which is generally around dozens of frames per second, ISC systems suffer from very low data rates. To overcome this problem, we developed a rotary LED transmitter that can boost the data rate of ISC systems while using a commercial camera with a low frame rate. The developed transmitter rotates LEDs that blink depending on the modulated data, faster than the shutter speed of the image sensor. In this case, the receiver can capture multiple blinking LEDs per image. To illustrate, the amount of information per image is increased by the rotating LEDs. This paper presents the prototype of the rotary LED transmitter and introduces its structure details. Moreover, we performed an implementation experiment of the transmitter, and it was found that the rotary LED transmitter can transfer 60 times the data rate of the conventional method with the same number of LEDs and the same camera frame rate.