ChromaCam: Demodulating Colored Light with a High-End Smartphone

Visible Light Communication (VLC) has seen drastic improvements in recent years, one approach uses active light sources like LEDs, switching them at hight speeds to send data. Another approach uses the fundamental characteristics of liquid crystals (birefringence and thickness) to transmit data to a single pixel receiver. These characteristics allow for alterations in the color of the light. Little power is being used to transmit this data in comparison with using LEDs, and is significant faster than switching the LCs fully on or off like other research has done. This paper proposes an algorithm to decode the data transmitted by LCs with a high-end smartphone instead of the single pixel receiver. This algorithm called ChromaCam has real time transmitter detection and decoding of data. A demonstration is shown using a prototype, achieving data rates of 31 bits per second.CSE3000 Research ProjectComputer Science and Engineerin