=========================================================================== VLCS 2016 Review #10A --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Paper #10: Unleashing the power of LED-to-camera communications for IoT devices --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Overall merit: 2. Weak reject Reviewer expertise: 3. Knowledgeable ===== Paper summary ===== The paper describes a way to use the rolling shutter of modern smart phones to receive data transmitted (e.g., from an LED). ===== Comments for author ===== The paper's topic is interesting. My main concern is that the paper does not seriously advance the state of the art. Earlier work, e.g., the project described in [7] obtained better results. And the approach presented seems to work only for a single LED (light source), there is no discussion how to extend the specific packet format to allow destination addresses. If the paper is accepted, you should clearly describe how your work relates to earlier efforts and how your paper improves upon earlier work resp. published projects. You may also want to look at papers in the 1st and 2nd ACM Mobicom Workshop on VLCS to learn about other approaches. =========================================================================== VLCS 2016 Review #10B --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Paper #10: Unleashing the power of LED-to-camera communications for IoT devices --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Overall merit: 2. Weak reject Reviewer expertise: 3. Knowledgeable ===== Paper summary ===== This paper designs and evaluates a cheap prototype of a LED-to-camera communication system. The central contribution of the paper is an LED-to-camera LED detection and processing algorithm. ===== Comments for author ===== I suggest a heavy writing revision to better position your work's academic contributions. If the contribution of the work is simply a evaluative case study of prior work, this is welcome, but should be explicitly stated. If, however, the contribution of the work is the detection and image processing algorithm, it is difficult to see what contributions this paper makes over the state of the art, specifically in prior works that exploit rolling shutter artifacts to read LED information. The strategies presented in this paper do not appear to be novel and seem to be too implementation-specific. This is partially because the contributions are stated as particular parameter values alongside the strategies themselves. This confuses the reader between design strategies and implementation decisions. As a consequence, the strategies presented in the paper are not properly evaluated nor even positioned in a way to be evaluated strongly. --- Minor critiques: The challenges are not clearly laid out, but instead embedded in your "Real Time Computation" section. This is highly confusing. The section titled "Evaluation" describes a metric of merit, but not an evaluation of your contribution. I suggest a retitling of this section, and perhaps folding it into the System Design section. "Environment Impact" is an ambiguous section title, and gives a first impression that it will discuss the effects of your communication devices on the surrounding environment. =========================================================================== VLCS 2016 Review #10C --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Paper #10: Unleashing the power of LED-to-camera communications for IoT devices --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Overall merit: 3. Weak accept Reviewer expertise: 3. Knowledgeable ===== Paper summary ===== This paper discusses an LED camera communication prototype that is evaluated in a variety of circumstances in the real-world. ===== Comments for author ===== This paper does a nice job of providing an overview of camera communication along with an implementation and real-world evaluation. The value of the paper is largely in the evaluation since none of the techniques are conceptually new. The paper could be improved by focusing more on the benchmarking and simply citing the techniques used in other papers. =========================================================================== VLCS 2016 Review #10D --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Paper #10: Unleashing the power of LED-to-camera communications for IoT devices --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Overall merit: 3. Weak accept Reviewer expertise: 3. Knowledgeable ===== Paper summary ===== This paper presents a system for communication between LED and smartphone camera. ===== Comments for author ===== The paper addresses an interesting problem. The system design and impl. are solid. Some interesting system issues are discussed. The evaluation is based on a testbed. The main concern is on the limited novelty. Most of the description is about engineering details, and it's very clear to me what differentiates this work from some existing projects. Shutter effect has been explored before to improve reception data rate of camera. The modulation scheme of LED is also standard. Having said that, putting everything together and making it work reliably does require significant efforts. Overall I think this system work is useful for the community.