Vehicle Positioning Based on Optical Camera Communication in V2I Environments

Demand for precise vehicle positioning (VP) increases as autonomous vehicles have recently been drawing attention. This paper proposes a scheme for positioning vehicles on the move based on optical camera communication (OCC) technology in the vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) environment. Light-emitting diode (LED) streetlights and vehicle cameras are used as transmitters and receivers respectively. Regions of streetlights are detected and traced by examining images that are obtained from cameras of vehicles. Then, a scheme for analyzing visible light data extracted from the images is proposed. The proposed vehicle positioning scheme uses information on angles between vectors that are formed under the collinearity conditions between the absolute coordinates of at least three received streetlights, and the coordinates of an image sensor. The experiments are performed under stationary state and moving state at a speed of 5 and 20 km/h. To verify the reliability of the proposed scheme, a comparison is made between the actual and estimated location of the camera in the stationary state. In addition, the path of a moving vehicle and the estimated path of the vehicle are compared to check the performance of the scheme. The performance of the proposed technique is analyzed and experimental demonstration confirms that the proposed OCC-based VP scheme achieves positioning accuracy of under 1 m.