A Novel Frame Identification and Synchronization Technique for Smartphone Visible Light Communication Systems Based on Convolutional Neural Networks

Abstract: This paper proposes a novel, robust, and lightweight supervised Convolutional Neural Network (CNN)-based technique for frame identification and synchronization, designed to enhance short-link communication performance in a screen-to-camera (S2C) based visible light communication (VLC) system. Developed using Python and the TensorFlow Keras framework, the proposed CNN model was trained through three real-time experimental investigations conducted in Jupyter Notebook. These experiments incorporated a dataset created from scratch to address various real-time challenges in S2C communication, including blurring, cropping, and rotated images in mobility scenarios. Overhead frames were introduced for synchronization, which leads to enhanced system performance. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed model achieves an overall accuracy of approximately 98.74%, highlighting its effectiveness in identifying and synchronizing frames in S2C VLC systems.