# Towards High-Speed Passive Visible Light Communication with Event Cameras and Digital Micro-Mirrors

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.14228 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.14228/

## Key facts

- Cited by 7 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 18 Oct 2024.

## Built on by (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [Ultra-High-Frequency Harmony: mmWave Radar and Event Camera Orchestrate Accurate Drone Landing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.14992/) (2025)
- [A Monocular Event-Camera Motion Capture System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.12113/) (2025)
- [Low-Latency Event-Based Velocimetry for Quadrotor Control in a Narrow Pipe](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.15444/) (2025)
- [Event-based Optical Marker Systems: A survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.20736/) (2025)
- [Ev-Layout: A Large-scale Event-based Multi-modal Dataset for Indoor Layout Estimation and Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.08370/) (2025)
- [Distance Estimation in Outdoor Driving Environments Using Phase-only Correlation Method with Event Cameras](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.17582/) (2025)
- [Asynchronous Tracking, Optical Communication and 3D Motion Capture using Event-based Sensors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.04342/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Passive visible light communication (VLC) modulates light propagation or reflection to transmit data without directly modulating the light source. Thus, passive VLC provides an alternative to conventional VLC, enabling communication where the light source cannot be directly controlled. There have been ongoing efforts to explore new methods and devices for modulating light propagation or reflection. The state-of-the-art has broken the 100 kbps data rate barrier for passive VLC by using a digital micro-mirror device (DMD) as the light modulating platform, or transmitter, and a photo-diode as the receiver. We significantly extend this work by proposing a massive spatial data channel framework for DMDs, where individual channels can be decoded in parallel using an event camera at the receiver. For the event camera, we introduce event processing algorithms to detect numerous channels and decode bits from individual channels with high reliability. Our prototype, built with off-the-shelf event cameras and DMDs, can decode up to ~2,000 parallel channels, achieving a data transmission rate of 1.6 Mbps, markedly surpassing current benchmarks by 16x.