Ultra low complexity video codec for endoscopic video capsules

In recent years endoscopic video capsules started to be widely employed by gastroenterologists for diagnosis of gastrointestinal pathologies. Even if the current video capsules can provide a good assistance for diagnosis tasks, especially on the small bowel´s examination, the necessity of performance´s improvement is evident. In order to increase frame rate and reduce energy consumption, a possible solution is the image´s compression. A number of freely available lossless and lossy codec libraries were evaluated regarding objective criteria as peak signal-to-noise ratio and software´s running times, providing a good estimation about image´s quality, algorithm´s complexity and energy consumption when computing medical images. Based on characteristics of the video sequences not exploited by the current implementations, an ultra low complexity video codec is proposed. The assessment of energy consumption confirmed this new video codec as a valid ultra low power technique.