When VLC Meets Under-Screen Camera

While radio communication still dominates in 5G, light and radios are expected to complement each other in the coming 6G networks. Visible Light Communication (VLC) is therefore attracting a tremendous amount of attention from both academia and industry. Recent studies showed that the front camera of pervasive smartphones is an ideal candidate to serve as the VLC receiver. While promising, we observe a recent trend with smartphones that can greatly hinder the adoption of smartphones for VLC, i.e., smartphones are moving towards full-screen for the best user experience. This trend forces front cameras to be placed under the devices' screen - -leading to the so-called Under-Screen Camera (USC) - -but we observe a severe performance degradation in VLC with USC: the transmission range is reduced from a few meters to merely 0.04 m, and the throughput is decreased by more than 90%. To address this issue, we leverage the unique spatiotemporal characteristics of the rolling shutter effect on USC to design a pixel-sweeping algorithm to identify the sampling points with minimal interference from the translucent screen. We further propose a novel slope-boosting demodulation method to deal with color shift brought by the leakage interference. We build a proof-of-concept prototype using two commercial smart-phones. Experiment results show that our proposed design reduces the BER by two orders of magnitude on average and improves the data rate by 59×: from 914 b/s to 54.43 kb/s. The transmission range is extended by roughly 100×: from 0.04 m to 4.2 m.