Rights Creative Commons: Attribution 3.0 Hong Kong License Image Transmission in Sensor Networks

Abstract — Wireless sensor networks allow fine-grained moni-toring of the environment. However, as sensors have physical lim-itations 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 tranmission 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 will be huge. To reduce the overheads, we can pre-process the images in the sensors before sending them back to the server, but this pre-processing 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. I