Advancing Image Compression Systems for Mobile, Wireless Networks

In many imaging applications, mobile agents—such as untethered reconnaissance robots and micro air vehicles—transmit and receive bandwidth-intensive image data over wireless networks. A key issue in developing small, mobile agents is minimizing their power requirements. Compressing the data before transmission is a direct way to significantly decrease power requirements; thus, effective image compression algorithms are critical to realizing a mobile, wireless, high quality imaging system. Field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) are a compelling hardware platform for low-power, mobile image compression devices. In this paper, we describe a novel method that our interdisciplinary team developed that significantly improves the performance of a hardware image compression system. Not only is the compression and hardware performance better than present technology, but our solution to low-power, high quality image compression is much simpler and faster to calculate. We also describe the primary factors in the creative process that we believe were critical to our success.