Detecting and coding region of interests in bi-level images for data reduction in Wireless Visual Sensor Network

Wireless Visual Sensor Network (WVSN) is formed by deploying many Visual Sensor Nodes (VSNs) in the field. The VSNs acquire images of the area of interest in the field, perform some local processing on these images and transmit the results using an embedded wireless transceiver. The energy consumption on transmitting the results wirelessly is correlated with the information amount that is being transmitted. The images acquired by the VSNs contain huge amount of data due to many kinds of redundancies in the images. Suitable bi-level image compression standards can efficiently reduce the information amount in images and will thus be effective in reducing the communication energy consumption in the WVSN. But compression capability of the bi-level image compression standards is limited to the underline compression algorithm. Further data reduction can be achieved by detecting Region of Interest (ROI) in the bi-level images and then coding these ROIs using bi-level image compression method. We explored the compression performance of the lossless ROI detection and coding method for various kinds of changes such as different shapes, locations and number of objects in the continuous set of frames. The CCITT Group 4, JBIG2 and Gzip are used for coding the detected ROIs. We concluded that CCITT Group 4 is a better choice for coding the ROIs in the Bi-level images because of its comparatively good compression performance and less computational complexity. This paper is intended to be a resource for the researchers interested in reducing the amount of data in the bi-level images for energy constrained WVSNs.