Adaptive Compression of Slowly Varying Images Transmitted over Wireless Sensor Networks

In this article a scheme for image transmission over Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) with an adaptive compression factor is introduced. The proposed control architecture affects the quality of the transmitted images according to: (a) the traffic load within the network and (b) the level of details contained in an image frame. Given an approximate transmission period, the adaptive compression mechanism applies Quad Tree Decomposition (QTD) with a varying decomposition compression factor based on a gradient adaptive approach. For the initialization of the proposed control scheme, the desired a priori maximum bound for the transmission time delay is being set, while a tradeoff among the quality of the decomposed image frame and the time needed for completing the transmission of the frame should be taken under consideration. Based on the proposed control mechanism, the quality of the slowly varying transmitted image frames is adaptively deviated based on the measured time delay in the transmission. The efficacy of the adaptive compression control scheme is validated through extended experimental results.