A system for transmitting optical communications includes a transmitter, a receiver, and a processor. The transmitter includes a light source driven by a driver circuit under control of a micro-controller to transmit an optical signal. The optical signal can be encoded by a frequency-modulated encoding scheme. The receiver includes an optical lens, an imaging sensor configured to receive the optical signal and a memory. The processor is configured to extract one or more frequencies from the optical signal for only those pixels that are changing and thus decreases an overall data rate for the system and allows for larger pixel arrays, thereby decreasing the accuracy requirements of any pointing hardware and to reconstruct a waveform for each of the extracted frequencies.