Towards robust visible light positioning under led shortage by visual-inertial fusion

Accurate indoor positioning is urgent for critical location-based services. The approach based on visible light communication (VLC) is promising, as it can deliver high accuracy by sharing the LED lighting infrastructure. In this paper, we propose an EKF-based tightly-coupled visual-inertial fusion method for visible light positioning with an IMU and a rolling-shutter camera, aiming for improved positioning robustness under LED shortage. With the proposed method, we can relax the assumption on the minimum number of concurrently observable LEDs required for positioning from three to one. Meanwhile, we can accurately track the sensor pair's global 3D pose in realtime. We evaluate our method by real-world experiments using a prototyping VLC network. The efficacy for VLC beaconing and 3D pose estimation, as well as the robustness under LED shortage, is verified by extensive experiments.