An Efficient Low Complexity Pruned DCT Approximation for Image Compression in Wireless Multimedia Sensor Networks

Prolonging the lifetime of wireless sensor networks (WSN) is the biggest challenging issue. In wireless multimedia sensor networks (WMSNs), sensor nodes have limited energy resource and to increase the lifetime of the network, it is necessary to design an effective fast algorithm that aims at reducing the consumed power. This paper proposes an energy-efficient discrete cosine transform (DCT) approximation requiring only 12 additions. Associated with a JPEG compression chain, this DCT approximation ensures a very good rate-distortion compromise, but above all, a very low computational complexity and significant compatibility with the exact DCT. Simulation results clearly show that the proposed fast transform algorithm achieves a better trade-off between image quality, computational complexity and energy consumption compared to any existing pruned DCT approximations. Furthermore, it is very suitable for the resource constrained wireless visual sensor networks (WVSNs) requiring low bitrates.