Image transmission in sensor networks

Abstract

Wireless sensor networks allow fine-grained monitoring of the environment. However, as sensors have physical limitations in energy, processing power, and memory, etc., techniques have to be developed to efficiently utilize the limited resource available in a sensor network. In this paper, we study the image transmission problem in sensor networks. Cameras are installed in various locations of a wide area to take images of targeted objects. These images have to be sent back to a centralized server, which may be very far away from the cameras. Therefore, the images have to traverse the sensors hop by hop to the server. As images usually contain a large amount of data, if they are sent individually, the communication overheads are huge. To reduce the overheads, we can pre-process the images in the sensors before sending them back to the server, but this preprocessing requires extra energy in the sensors. In this paper, we study how images can be efficiently transmitted through a sensor network. We aim at reducing the energy needed in transmitting the images while maintaining the quality of the combined image.