A Fingerprint Based Indoor Visible Light Positioning System for Tilted Receivers Equipped with a Single Photo Detector

Indoor positioning systems (IPS) are gaining higher attention recently due to the increased demand for indoor location aware services. Visible light communication (VLC) is a promising technology to use for IPS. In particular, received signal strength (RSS) based visible light positioning (VLP) systems are gaining high attention due to their low complexity and cost, in addition to higher positioning accuracy compared to their radio frequency (RF) counterparts. One of the main challenges in RSS based VLP systems is encountered when the receiver (the target) is tilted and not placed in parallel with the transmitters (the anchors). RSS based trilateration techniques require a computationally expensive and time-consuming process to solve the nonlinear problem of tilted receivers. Fingerprint based systems generally provide high positioning accuracy with short positioning time, and maybe used to circumvent the need to deal with the high complexity associated with tilted receivers. However, the design of a fingerprinting VLP system for tilted receiver has not been explored yet as far as receivers with a single photodetector (PD) are concerned. In this work, a fingerprint based VLP system for tilted receivers using artificial neural networks (ANN) is proposed, where different types of input features for training the positioning algorithm are studied. We show that using the components of the normal vector to the PD's surface in addition to RSS values provides an excellent positioning accuracy with an average positioning error of 25.41 cm and a remarkably low average positioning time less than 5 μ s. In addition, important research directions for future work are discussed.