An energy efficient image compression scheme for Wireless Sensor Networks

While wireless sensor networks are finding an ever increasing number of applications in many areas, they still lack the most powerful human sense - vision. This is largely due to the problems associated with processing and communicating the large volume of image data over energy constrained sensor nodes. Available wireless sensor nodes are severely constrained in both processing capability and energy. This paper presents an innovative architecture and protocol for energy efficient processing and communication of images over wireless sensor networks. The proposed hardware architecture is optimized to achieve high speed image compression with minimum hardware requirement and low power consumption. An efficient and reliable transmission protocol for compressed image is also presented. It incorporates an effective image packet queue control strategy to reduce packet error rate and increase image transmission throughput. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of these novel approaches to make image compression and communication over wireless sensor networks feasible, reliable and efficient.