A new approach for distributed image coding in wireless sensor networks

Power and bandwidth constraints are two major challenges in wireless sensor networks. Since a considerable amount of energy in sensor networks is consumed for data transmission, compression techniques may prolong the life of such networks. Moreover, with fewer bits to transmit, the network can cope better with the problem of inadequate bandwidth. In this paper, we consider an image sensor network and propose a paradigm based on the principles of Distributed Source Coding (DSC) for efficient compression. Our method relies on high correlation between the sensor nodes. The algorithm consists of two phases: the Training Phase and the Main Phase. In the Training Phase an aggregation node or a cluster head determines the correlation of the sources, and in the Main Phase the image is coded based on the computed correlations. We compare our method with JPEG and show its superiority in terms of compression ratio as the correlation increases.