A Distributed Image Compression Algorithm for Wireless Multimedia Sensor Networks

Recent advances in multimedia sensor networks made the image sensors applicable in many different types of sensor network applications such as environmental monitoring, surveillance and target tracking. Especially for image based applications, image data is needed to be compressed due to the requirement of large amount of data for representing the visual data. Although image compression is made for gaining from the energy consumption, this process requires very high computational power when an only single node takes this process on. Because of the constraints in energy, memory and the computational power, nodes should share the image processing tasks to balance the computational load on the sensor networks. In order to achieve this, we propose a distributed image compression algorithm which is based on Discrete Wavelet Transform for wireless multimedia sensor networks. We compared the proposed algorithm both with the centralized and the distributed approaches. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm performs better than the compared algorithms for energy consumption, system lifetime and the image quality parameters.