Energy Aware Priority-Based Secure Image Transmission in Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless Multimedia Sensor Networks (WMSNs) are gaining research interest due to the availability of low-cost cameras and CMOS image sensors, also due to their broad application opportunities. The energy and resource constrained environment of WMSNs calls for low complexity energy aware image authentication and transmission schemes with minimal overheads. The proposed scheme enhances the data security with stream authentication while minimising the energy utilisation for the authentication as well as transmission by adopting a preferential transmission based on the importance of the data packets in the code stream. Inherent correlation among neighbouring pixels in an image and the multi resolution capability of wavelet coding is exploited to propose an adaptive priority based image authentication and transmission scheme. Simulation results show an encouraging and improved energy efficiency without compromising reconstructed visual quality.