Low Complexity DCT Approximation for Image Compression in Wireless Image Sensor Networks

Energy consumption is a critical problem affecting the lifetime of wireless image sensor networks (WISNs). In such systems, images are usually compressed using JPEG standard to save energy during transmission. And since DCT transformation is the most computationally intensive part in the JPEG technique, several approximation techniques have been proposed to further decrease the energy consumption. In this paper, we propose a low-complexity DCT approximation method which is based on the combination of the rounded DCT with a pruned approach. Experimental comparison with recently proposed schemes, using Atmel Atmega128L platform, shows that our method requires less arithmetic operations, and hence less processing time and/or the energy consumption while providing better performance in terms of PSNR metric.