Adaptive image compression technique for wireless sensor networks

When using wireless sensor networks for real-time image transmission, some critical points should be considered. These points are limited computational power, storage capability, narrow bandwidth and required energy. Therefore, efficient compression and transmission of images in wireless sensor network is considered. To address the above mentioned concerns, an efficient adaptive compression scheme that ensures a significant computational and energy reduction as well as communication with minimal degradation of the image quality is proposed. This scheme is based on wavelet image transform and distributed image compression by sharing the processing of tasks to extend the overall lifetime of the network. Simulation results are presented and they show that the proposed scheme optimizes the network lifetime, reduces significantly the amount of the required memory and minimizes the computation energy by reducing the number of arithmetic operations and memory accesses. (C) 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.