On the performance of ROI-based image transmission using cooperative diversity

In this paper, we examine the spatial diversity of cooperative communications for image transmission without deploying multiple antennas at the transmitter. We propose a novel region of interest (ROI)-based scheme for image transmission over wireless cooperative/relay fading channels. By having the relay terminal assist the direct communications, we can increase the resilience for ROI against the error-prone fading channels. Our proposed scheme significantly improves the performance of ROI compared to the direct communications (no-cooperation) and conventional relay networks without performing any forward error correction (FEC) code as well as retransmission. Although, in this paper we consider the adaptive decode-forward (ADF) relay protocol. Our proposed scheme can be easily adopted to any other relaying protocol, namely, fixed decode-forward (FDF), amplify-forward (AF), hybrid decode-amplify-forward (HDAF), and distributed-Alamouti space-time coding. Simulation results show that under the the same total transmit power constraint our proposed scheme significant outperforms the conventional ones in terms of bit error rate (BER) and peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR). This in turn improves the perceptual quality of the ROI.