Near-Infrared based Optical Camera Communications

We report, for the first time in the literature, an optical camera communications (OCC) link leveraging a near-infrared band at a wavelength of 850 nm that is visible to a standard camera and undetectable by the human eye. An experimental test-bed is developed and evaluated for the proposed system. The quality of the proposed communication link is measured in terms of the eye diagram and the bit error rate (BER) for different signal bandwidths. We demonstrated that, an acceptable BER (below the forward error correction limit) can be achieved with a data rate of ~2 kbps using a single near-infrared light-emitting diode, a commercially available camera with a 30-frame rate. This work paves the way to enable the use of the OCC links to many internet of things applications with low cost and no additional complexity.