Image Compression and Wireless Multimedia Sensor Networks – A Survey

Objectives: Wireless Multimedia Sensor Network (WMSN) is a fast emerging technology, which can deal with audio, image and video along with scalar data. WMSN is widely used for many applications like wildlife monitoring, medical imaging and surveillance. The survey is to investigate the several image compression methods that are intended for WMSN. Methods: Compression techniques are used to minimize the volume of data transmitted, which in turn reduces the sum of communication power and processing power. Any operation performed on multimedia data should be lightweight and so traditional image compression techniques are not suitable. This mandates the growth of new techniques or modification of existing methods to make them suitable for WMSN. Findings: Suitability of the methods is analyzed by the metrics like compression efficiency, processing speed, memory requirement, power consumption, computational load and system complexity. It is found that SPIHT is the most suitable with limitations of moderate memory usage. Distributed Source Coding and Compressive sensing are in the developmental stage and will influence the future vision of image compression in WMSN. Applications: Every method has its own merits and demerits. The one to be chosen is entirely dependent on the application or user needs, the hardware/software platforms used for implementation and the cost constraints. The most desirable algorithm can be chosen and enhancements can be done as per the demands.