Chaotic Scan: A Low Complexity Video Transmission System for Efficiently Sending Relevant Image Features

A novel image scanning and transmission system is proposed, where the traditional raster scan is replaced with a new one, called a chaotic scan. The result is a low complexity image transmission system with encryption and spread spectrum capabilities well suited for compressed sensing applications. Due to the uncorrelated nature of the consecutively scanned pixels, it allows a form of progressive compression and fast discovery of the relevant image features using only a small fraction of the transmitted pixels. The key ingredient of the proposed system is a chaotic counter addressing the sensor array, based on a cellular automaton exhibiting a pseudo-random chaotic behavior and binary synchronization property.