Experimental Demonstration of 32‐PAM Optical Camera Communication Using a Low Cost and a High Cost Camera

This work demonstrates experimentally the feasibility of using up to 32‐PAM in rolling shutter based optical camera communication (OCC). Two different cameras have been used for OCC performance comparison, namely, a low‐cost Pi Camera V2.1 and a higher‐cost Alvium 1800 U‐500m. Based on the limitations evidenced by this analysis, a decoding algorithm has been proposed to recover the transmitted signal from the acquired images. The experimental evaluation has been carried out for distances up to 2 m, using 8‐PAM, 16‐PAM and 32‐PAM, analysing the received samples histograms and the symbol error rate (SER) for both cameras. Based on the collected experimental results, it is concluded that 32‐PAM is possible with both cameras, with a maximum SER of 0.16% for the Alvium camera and 5.05% for the Pi Camera. Finally, it is observed that both the signal and noise amplitudes remain constant for the tested distances, resulting in a SER that does not notably depend on the distance between the transmitter and receiver.