Visible Light Communication-Based Vehicle-to-Vehicle Tracking Using CMOS Camera

This paper presents a visible light-communication-based vehicle-to-vehicle tracking system using a new positioning algorithm and modified version of the Kalman filter. In this system, LED head and tail lamps on the vehicles are used to transmit the positioning signals to other vehicles. Two CMOS dashboard cameras on each vehicle are used to receive these signals. From the geometric relationship between two cameras and the images of LEDs captured by these two cameras, the instantaneous position of the target vehicle can be determined, given that at least one LED of the target vehicle is in the view frame of the two cameras. The discrete positioning result always contains unavoidable errors, which consist of systematic errors caused by the CMOS rolling shutter artifact and the weak spatial separability of the sensor, and other random errors. The contribution of this paper is twofold. First, a new positioning algorithm with two compensation mechanisms is proposed to eliminate systematic errors. Second, a modified Kalman filter is proposed to filter out random errors to achieve a smooth and accurate tracking result for the vehicle position. The performance of the system is verified through simulations.