Color-filter-free spatial visible light communication using RGB-LED and mobile-phone camera

A novel color-filter-free visible-light communication (VLC) system using red-green-blue (RGB) light emitting diode (LED) and mobile-phone camera is proposed and demonstrated for the first time. A feature matching method, which is based on the scale-invariant feature transform (SIFT) algorithm for the received grayscale image is used instead of the chromatic information decoding method. The proposed method is simple and saves the computation complexity. The signal processing is based on the grayscale image computation; hence neither color-filter nor chromatic channel information is required. A proof-of-concept experiment is performed and high performance channel recognition is achieved.