Efficient Hardware-Based Image Compression Schemes for Wireless Sensor Networks: A Survey

Multidimensional sensors, such as digital camera sensors in the visual sensor networks VSNs generate a huge amount of information compared with the scalar sensors in the wireless sensor networks WSNs. Processing and transmitting such data from low power sensor nodes is a challenging issue through their limited computational and restricted bandwidth requirements in a hardware constrained environment. Source coding can be used to reduce the size of vision data collected by the sensor nodes before sending it to its destination. With image compression, a more efficient method of processing and transmission can be obtained by removing the redundant information from the captured image raw data. In this paper, a survey of the main types of the conventional state of the art image compression standards such as JPEG and JPEG2000 is provided. A literature review of their advantages and shortcomings of the application of these algorithms in the VSN hardware environment is specified. Moreover, the main factors influencing the design of compression algorithms in the context of VSN are presented. The selected compression algorithm may have some hardware-oriented properties such as; simplicity in coding, low memory need, low computational load, and high-compression rate. In this survey paper, an energy efficient hardware based image compression is highly requested to counter the severe hardware constraints in the WSNs.