Image compression and transmission through a low-rate ultrasonic link in subsea telerobotic applications

This paper describes a progressive data compression algorithm for subsea gray-level image (data) transmission through a low rate ultrasonic link in a telerobotics system. The proposed image compression algorithm is based on JPEG, and has been, modified for a specific subsea application, where the communication bit rate is confined to 100-200 bits/s and a frequent updating of reconstructed images is required. The experimental result based on 23 real images shows that the proposed image data compression algorithm performs better than JPEG when images are reconstructed from a small amount of data. The transmission error effect and computational complexity have also been analysed with respect to the proposed algorithm.