Simple and energy efficient discrete cosine transform based image compression for simple pulse-based modulation

A node in wireless sensor networks has limited battery capacity. In this case, energy efficiency is crucial to prolong the sensor devices lifetime. In this paper, we propose a simple and energy efficient image compression (SEIC), based on Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) transform, in addition to our previous proposed method based on Discrete Wavelet Transform (SEIC-DWT). SEIC (DCT or DWT) consists of transform coding and low-weight code. Transform coding is used to reduce the data size and low-weight code is used to reduce the number of pulse transmission in pulse-based modulation. We investigates the system performance in terms of visual quality, energy efficiency and robustness against transmission error. Moreover, we compare our method with well-known image compression standard, such as PNG, JPEG and JPEG 2000. The results show that our proposed method outperform them in most-metrics. For example, SEIC-DCT outperform JPEG in all metrics.