In order to solve the demerits of needing professional operators, low information transmission rate and so on of traditional lighting communication, automatic lighting communication equipment is not available in the current market as well, an automatic light communication receiver is designed in this paper. Some key technologies of automatic light communication receiver are researched on two aspects of system hardware and software structure design, while retaining the advantages of traditional light communication. Several light communication tests were carried out between two boats to verify the superiority of the proposed automatic light communication receiver. Experimental results show that the proposed automatic light communication receiver can overcome the shortcomings of low transmission rate, low degree of automation and so on of the traditional lighting communication, it is fairly practical as well.