High performance demodulation method with less complexity for image-sensor communication

This study presents a novel method for signal demodulation for use with visible light communication systems composed of an image sensor as a receiver and light-emitting diode (LED) transmitters. Demodulation is a central challenge in the design of such a system, as the image captured at the image-sensor receiver is deteriorated by distance and noise. We propose a demodulation method that offers performance approaching that of the maximum-likelihood decoding (MLD) method and with significantly less complexity. The proposed method first applies the minimum mean square error (MMSE) method to each LED into reliable LEDs and unreliable LEDs according to the MMSE results and it demodulates the LEDs judged as reliable directly. Then, the MLD method is applied only to the unreliable LEDs to demodulate their signals. The results of numerical simulations and lab experiments are presented to evaluate the performance of this modified demodulation method.