Object recognition in optical camera communication enabled by image restoration

As an important branch of visible light communication (VLC), optical camera communication (OCC) has received increasing attention recently, owing to its availability and low cost of deployment by re-using cameras as VLC receivers. However, cameras on popular smartphones and/or closed-circuit television systems have their primary function for taking pictures and recognizing objects, where the recorded images with objects are inevitable to be distorted by the coded light under OCC. To this end, we propose and experimentally demonstrate an improved OCC system which is able to achieve data communication and object recognition simultaneously. Basically, we devise an image restoration (IR) scheme to repair the pixels damaged by modulated light during data transmission, and it hence provides better image input to realize object recognition. Moreover, to maintain a reasonable data rate of OCC, we also engineer an object avoidance (OA) scheme to remove the negative effect caused by the object background in OCC frame. Finally, we implement a prototype of the proposed system to verify its performance on object recognition and communication, and experimental results show that the proposed IR can bring an improvement over 37% in terms of object recognition accuracy comparing to the baseline under a data rate of 5 kbps.