A Visible Light Positioning Technique Based on Artificial Neural Network

This paper presents an indoor positioning strategy based on Visible Light Communication that relies on LED luminaires as transmitters, whose luminous flux is modulated at different frequencies, and a light sensor as a receiver. Then, a previously trained Artificial Neural Network (ANN) uses the illuminance signal gathered by the receiver as input to estimate the sensor’s position. The main contribution of the technique is that the ANN is trained by using an illuminance estimator based on the lighting distribution of the luminaires, which is obtained through the IES file provided by the luminaire’s manufacturer, without the need to collect data from the environment. In this work, the designed illuminance estimator is validated by comparing it to the well-known commercial software DIALux and Relux. The algorithm’s setting and the performance evaluation of the ANN are explained. Then, the impact of the lighting uniformity and the environment’s number of divisions on the accuracy of the results is analyzed. Error analyses are also made by adding uncertainty to the illuminance measurements obtained by the sensor. Finally, the work is compared to several papers in the field.