Wearables Can Afford: Light-weight Indoor Positioning with Visible Light

Visible Light Positioning (VLP) provides a promising means to achieve indoor localization with sub-meter accuracy. We observe that the Visible Light Communication (VLC) methods in existing VLP systems rely on intensity-based modulation, and thus they require a high pulse rate to prevent flickering. However, the high pulse rate adds an unnecessary and heavy burden to receiving devices. To eliminate this burden, we propose the polarization-based modulation, which is flicker-free, to enable a low pulse rate VLC. In this way, we make VLP light-weight enough even for resource-constrained wearable devices, e.g. smart glasses. Moreover, the polarization-based VLC can be applied to any illuminating light sources, thereby eliminating the dependency on LED. This paper presents the VLP system PIXEL, which realizes our idea. In PIXEL, we develop three techniques, each of which addresses a design challenge: 1) a novel color-based modulation scheme to handle users? mobility, 2) an adaptive downsampling algorithm to tackle the uneven sampling problem of wearables? low-cost camera and 3) a computational optimization method for the positioning algorithm to enable real-time processing. We implement PIXEL?s hardware using commodity components and develop a software program for both smartphone and Google glass. Our experiments based on the prototype show that PIXEL can provide accurate realtime VLP for wearables and smartphones with camera resolution as coarse as 60 pixel x 80 pixel and CPU frequency as low as 300MHz.