A camera-based vehicular visible light communication system using modulated taillights in public road scenarios

This paper proposes a camera-based vehicular visible light communication system using modulated LED taillights for vehicle-to-vehicle communication. The taillights are modulated using on-off keying with a carrier frequency above the critical flicker frequency threshold to appear steady to the human eye and only a camera with a short exposure time can perceive the signal. For receiving the signal, a common camera with a recording frame rate of 30 frames per second was used for the experiments. This limits the throughput of the communication system as only one bit per frame and per individually modulated light source can be transmitted, thus the system is not suitable for transmitting time-critical data. However, the main advantage is that the transmitted data as well as the transmitting vehicle are visible in the camera image, hence we can associate the message and its origin.