Underwater video streaming using adaptive frame decimation

We introduce a low data rate video compression scheme for underwater acoustic communication. Recently, multi-carrier based underwater acoustic modems have been proposed and tested for data rates of up to tens of kilobits-per-second for about 1-4 kilometers transmission range. Online transmission of video data using these rates requires extreme compression. Herein, we propose pre-encoder and post-decoder processing in order to reduce the data rate. This is done by exploiting the characteristics of underwater videos for excluding frames. The algorithm was tested and analyzed in simulation environment with several video samples taken by divers in shallow waters of the Mediterranean. We show that using this technique, increased performance is achieved compared to standard H.264/AVC based codecs in both objective and subjective terms.