A novel energy efficient object detection and image transmission approach for wireless multimedia sensor networks

Energy efficient object detection and image transmission are one of the key issues in wireless multimedia sensor networks (WMSN). Recent approaches in the WMSN propose in-node object detection and tracking algorithms. However, a little effort has been made to effectively detect object presence and absence in images in the WMSN. Since object detection has a direct relation with image transmission, therefore effective object detection algorithm would provide a reduction in the false transmission of image information. In this paper, a novel object presence model and an image transmission scheme are proposed for the WMSN. This scheme uses the transmission of image segments rather than a complete image. It guarantees in-node energy conservation and minimal image content transmission to the sink node. The proposed scheme is evaluated based on in-node energy consumption and reconstructed image peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR). Simulation results show that the proposed approach saves 95% of the node energy with the received image PSNR of 46 dB as compared with other state-of-the-art approaches.