DCT & DWT Images Compression Algorithms in Wireless Sensors Networks: Comparative Study and Performance Analysis

The recent availability of inexpensive hardware has enabled the new research field of wireless sensor networks. This is a network of interconnected devices, capable of retrieving images from the environment. The nodes, in this type of network, have very limited resources, in terms of processing unit, bandwidth and energy. Efficient coding of the image content is therefore important. In Wireless Sensors Network, many image compression algorithms are used. Indeed, the most popular methods such as JPEG or JPEG2000 can yield higher energy consumption than when transmitting uncompressed images. However, the most of the compression algorithms are inapplicable on sensor nodes because the limitation in terms of memory as well as processor speed. To solve this problem, we use DWT and DCT image compression algorithm that allows an efficient tradeoff between energy consumption and image distortion. These experimental results demonstrated by the performance evaluation are in terms of image quality, execution time and memory space, as shown in this paper.