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.