Visible Light Positioning With Lamé Curve LEDs: A Generic Approach for Camera Pose Estimation

Camera-based visible light positioning (VLP) is a promising technique for accurate and low-cost indoor camera pose estimation (CPE). To reduce the number of required light-emitting diodes (LEDs), advanced methods commonly exploit LED shape features for positioning. Although interesting, they are typically restricted to a single LED geometry, leading to failure in heterogeneous LED-shape scenarios. To address this challenge, this paper investigates Lamé curves as a unified representation of common LED shapes and proposes a generic VLP algorithm using Lamé curve-shaped LEDs, termed LC-VLP. In the considered system, multiple ceiling-mounted Lamé curve-shaped LEDs periodically broadcast their curve parameters via visible light communication, which are captured by a camera-equipped receiver. Based on the received LED images and curve parameters, the receiver can estimate the camera pose using LC-VLP. Specifically, an LED database is constructed offline to store the curve parameters, while online positioning is formulated as a nonlinear least-squares problem and solved iteratively. To provide a reliable initialization, a correspondence-free perspective-n-points (FreePnP) algorithm is further developed, enabling approximate CPE without any pre-calibrated reference points. The performance of LC-VLP is verified by both simulations and experiments. Simulations show that LC-VLP outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both circular- and rectangular-LED scenarios. Compared to a perspective arcs algorithm, LC-VLP can achieve reductions of both over 30% in average position and rotation errors. Experiments further show that LC-VLP can achieve an average position accuracy of less than 4 cm.