Let the Light Guide Us VLC-Based Localization

We propose to use visible-light beacons for low-cost indoor localization. Modulated light-emitting diode (LED) lights are adapted for localization as well as illumination. The proposed solution consists of two components: light-signal decomposition and Bayesian localization. First, a correlation-based method is used to decompose asynchronously mixed light signals to extract fingerprints. Note that the synchronization of multiple light signals is not required, which further contributes to reducing the overall deployment cost of the system. Second, a Gaussian process (GP) is used to model the fingerprint distributions. Based on the output of the GP, a Bayesian localization framework is applied to improve the precision. We demonstrate our localization system by real-time experiments performed on a tablet PC in an indoor environment, achieving submeter accuracy, which outperforms other existing low-cost indoor localization systems, such as received signal strength indication (RSSI)-based approaches. © 2016 IEEE.