Efficient Spatial Averaging Filter for High Quality Compressed

Wireless Image Transmission

Santha Devi.P, Sivakumar. M & Arthanariee A

1
Mother Teresa Women‟s University, Kodaikanal, Tamil Nadu, India.
2
Anna University, Coimbatore,Tamil Nadu, India.
3
Department of Science and Humanities, Nehru Institute of Technology,
Kaliyapalayam, Coimbatore – 105, Tamil Nadu, India.
Email: psanthabaskar@gmail.com, sivala@gmail.com, arthanarimsvc@gmail.com

image communication an important research topic in

Abstract - In Wireless Multimedia Sensor Network
(WMSN), image communication plays an important role to
handle the issues, resource consumption and the quality of
the image being transmitted without noise in wireless
channels. Initially, the image is compressed by improved
polyomines lossless compression technique, which
increases the quality of image at receiving end of the
wireless communication. Compressed image is transmitted
by Energy Efficient High Quality Image Transmission
scheme (EEHQIT) to achieve energy efficient image
transmissions in WSNs. EEHQIT scheme is compelling
due to its ability of saving individual power consumption
over multiple sensors by spreading total transmission
consumption. In this paper, spatial average filtering
technique is proposed, removes the noise from the
transmitted image and rebuilding the image to obtain the
original image without loosing any portion of information
from it. The spatial averaging filter was implemented, and
tested on the transmitted compressed image. The
experimental results show that the spatial averaging filter
improves the image quality of the compressed image at the
receiver side. Simulation results show up to 85% reduction
in the total power consumption achieved and higher PSNR
value achieved with the proposed noise filtering strategy.
Keywords: Wireless Communication, Image Compression,
Image quality, Interactive Transmission
I. INTRODUCTION
Several energy efficient protocols of image
compression are proposed for wireless applications. The
growth of 3G wireless communication systems in line
with internet popularity made wireless multimedia
current network communication field. The characteristic
of wireless multimedia communication which can be
used to overcome the bandwidth and energy bottlenecks
is that the conditions and requirements for mobile
communication vary. Variations in wireless channel
conditions may be due to user mobility, changing
terrain, etc.
The usual method for transmitting images over the
Internet is to first compress the images using a lossy
scheme such as JPEG, and then to transmit them across
the intrinsically lossy Internet using the lossless TCP/IP
protocol. JPEG and related lossy schemes are very
sensitive to bit errors and hence require lossless
transmission. The price paid for lossless transmission
over a lossy medium is excessively lengthy transmission
times due to retransmissions of lost packets. A more
efficient means of transmitting the data is via some form
of redundant transmission (forward error correction)
which will make serious transmission errors unlikely.
Redundancy must be applied selectively, however, since
the addition of redundancy increases the amount of
information to be transmitted. The compressed image is
transmitted using EEHQIT scheme.
Each imaging system suffers with a common
problem of Noise. Unwanted data which may reduce the
contrast deteriorating the shape or size of objects in the
image and blurring of edges or dilution of fine details in
the image may be termed as noise. It may be introduced
by the image formation process, image recording, image
transmission, etc. These random distortions make it
difficult to perform any required picture processing. For
example, the feature oriented enhancement is very
effective in restoring blurry images, but it can be
"frozen" by an oscillatory noise component. Even a

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small amount of noise is harmful when high accuracy is
required, e.g. as in sub cell (subpixel) image analysisIn
this paper, we propose to denoise images by filtering the
image. The Box filter is used for removing the noise
from the image.
II. RELATED WORKS
Literature survey in [1][2][4] addressed various
issues regarding the challenges faced by research
community in realizing WMSN. The early research
efforts in wireless sensor networks did not investigate
the issues of node collaboration, focusing more on
issues in the design and packaging of small, wireless
devices [5], more recent efforts (e.g. [6], [7]) have
considered node collaboration issues such as data
“aggregation” or “fusion”. Our approach of distributed
image compression falls within the domain of
techniques that apply the concept of in-network
processing, i.e. processing in the network by computing
over the data as it flows through the nodes. It is worth
noting that current aggregation functions (e.g.,
“maximum” and “average” [7]) are limited to scalar
data. Our approach can be viewed as an extension to
vector data aggregation.
Previous distributed signal processing/compression
problems (e.g. [8], [9]) exploit correlations between data
at close-by sensors in order to jointly compress or fuse
the correlated information resulting in savings in
communication energy. In parallel distributed
computing theory [10], a problem (or task) is divided
into multiple sub-problems (or sub-tasks) of smaller size
(in terms of resource requirements). Every node solves
each sub problem by running the same local algorithm,
and the solution to the original problem is obtained by
combining the outputs from the different nodes. Our
approach to the design of distributed image compression
is similar in concept, in that we distribute the task of
image encoding/compression to multiple smaller image
encoding/compression sub-tasks. our proposed approach
of image compression intersects with the literature on
lossy and lossless compression, which primarily focuses
on polyomino technique.
Digital images are prone to a variety of types of
noise. There are several ways that noise can be
introduced into an image, depending on how the image
is created. For example: If the image is scanned from a
photograph made on film, the film grain is a source of
noise [11]. Noise can also be the result of damage to the
film, or be introduced by the scanner itself. If the image
is acquired directly in a digital format, the mechanism
for gathering the data (such as a CCD detector) can
introduce noise. Electronic transmission of image data
can introduce noise [12]. Image noise elimination
(reduction) [13] is the process of removing noise from
the image. Noise reduction techniques are conceptually
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very similar regardless of the signal being processed
[14], however a priori knowledge of the characteristics
of an expected signal can mean the implementations of
these techniques vary greatly depending on the type of
signal. In practice a lot of methods are used to eliminate
the noise from the image and a lot of filters are used. In
this paper we used box filter for removing the noise
from the image
III. IMAGE TRANSMISSION USING BOX FILTER
IN WMSN
3.1 Lossless Image Compression using Improved
Polyomino
There are two types of image compression: lossless
and lossy. After decompression the original image is
recovered. Compressing an image is significantly
different than compressing raw binary data. The general
purpose compression is used to compress images, but
the result is less than optimal. This is because images
have certain statistical properties which can be exploited
by encoders specifically designed for them. This also
means that lossy compression techniques can be used in
this area. An integer-to-integer wavelet transform
produces an integer-valued transform from the grey-
scale, integer-valued image. Since n loops in Bit-plane
encoding reduces the quantization error to less than
T0/2n, it follows that once 2n is greater than T0, and
there will be zero error. In other words, the bit-plane
encoded transform will be exactly the same as the
original wavelet transform, hence lossless encoding is
achieved Lossless compression involves with
compressing data which, when decompressed, will be an
exact replica of the original data. This is the case when
binary data such as executables, documents etc. are
compressed. They need to be exactly reproduced when
decompressed.
3.2 Wavelet Image Compression
Wavelet based image compression introduces no blocky
artifacts in the decompressed image. It is decompressed
image is much smoother and pleasant to eyes. We can
also achieve much higher compression ratios regardless
of the amount of compression achieved. By adding more
and more detail information we can improve the quality.
This feature is attractive for what is known as
progressive transmission of images. Another lossy
compression scheme developed for image compression
is the fractal base image compression scheme (fig 1).
However the fractal based image compression beginning
to loss ground because it is very complex and time
consuming.
The filter components are reduced their size by half
either by rejecting the even or odd samples thereby the
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total size of the original signal is preserved. The low
pass filter component retains almost all distinguishable
features of the original signal. And the high pass filter
component has little or no resemblance of the original
signal. The low pass component is again decomposed
into two components. The decomposition process can be
continued up to the last possible level or up to a certain
desired level. As the high pass filter components have
less information discernible to the original signal, we
can eliminate the information contents of the high pass
filters partially or significantly at each level of
decomposition during the reconstruction process. It is
this possibility of elimination of the information
contents of the high pass filter components that gives
higher compression ratio in the case of wavelet based
image compression.
3.3 Energy Efficient High Quality Image Transmission
scheme
In this paper, we propose image transmission
scheme driven by energy efficiency considerations in
order to be suitable for wireless sensor networks.
Wavelet image transform provides data decomposition
in multiple levels of resolution, so the image can be
divided into packets with different priorities, the packets
are ready to be sent.
Fig 1: Image Transmission with Reduced Noise
Figure 1 shows the diagrammatic representation of our
proposed Image Transmission Approach. The source
sensor transmits the packets starting by those with the
highest priority, and then continues with those of the
next lower priority, and so on. This is carried out using a
threshold-based drop scheme where each of the
priorities is associated to amount of energy. Of course,
the node does not initially know the state-of-charge of
the other nodes.
This knowledge is gradually obtained from received
acknowledgment packets. Thus feedback is used to an
energy level. A node can discard packets even if it has
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sufficient energy to forward them, if it knows that a
node further down the path has an insufficient report the
lowest energy level currently available in others nodes.
The delay induced by the feedback is proportional to the
distance between the concerned nodes .
3.4 Noise Reduction Filter
The filters in the Noise Reduction class are
designed to remove extreme or outlier values from the
transmitted image areas that should have relatively
uniform values. These outlier values are often the result
of additive noise imposed on the image by the
acquisition system or later processing errors. Median,
Modal etc., are some of the examples of this type. In this
work a study is made on the box filtering techniques
used to remove the noise from the transmitted image by
EEHQIT Scheme.
A spatial averaging filter in which all coefficients
are equal is called a box filter. These types of filters are
used for blurring and for noise reduction. The output of
such a linear smoothing filter is simply the average of
the pixels in the neighborhood of the pixel mask. The
idea behind smoothing filters is straight forward. By
replacing the value of every pixel in an image by the
average of the levels in the neighborhood of the filter
mask, the process results in an image with reduced
„sharp transitions‟. Hence the most obvious application
of smoothing is noise reduction.
IV. EXPERIMENTAL EVALUATION ON LOSSLESS
IMAGE COMPRESSION TECHNIQUES
The experimental evaluation on image transmission
is carried out with JPEG images comparing the noise
level with and without using filtering technique and
compare energy performance of image transmission
schemes in various scenarios. A monochrome image of
128X128 pixels, is used as a test image. This one is 8
bits per pixel originally encoded. That means a data
length of 16394 bytes, including the image header of 10
bytes. Numerical values adopted for the input
parameters of energy models are described below. Then,
we present the results of numerical application. To get a
reference, we evaluated the consumed energy by
transmitting the whole image (37249 bytes) reliably
without applying WT or compression algorithms. In the
following, we call that the "the original scenario". The
amount of energy dissipated to transmit the original
image is 15J per hop. Afterwards, we applied WT once
and then twice without compression. When WT is
applied once, we obtained a resolution 0 of 4106 bytes
and a resolution 1 of 12288 bytes. Similarly, when WT
was applied twice, we obtained 1034, 3072 and 12288
bytes for resolutions 1, 2 and 3 respectively. We
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computed the average energy consumption to transmit above approximately 50 dB, although this may vary in a
the image for scenario (Interactive Image Transmission minor way for each person
Energy and Time WT).The parameters which are used
in the filter performance evaluation are Signal to Noise
Ratio (SNR), Peak Signal to Noise Ratio (PSNR).

Calculation of SNR

SNR compares the level of desired signal to the level of

background noise. The higher the ratio, the less
obtrusive the background noise is.

SNR in decibels is defined as

Vo2
SNR  10 log
Ve2 Figure 2: Imge size vs PSNR

V02 is the variance of the noise free image and Figure 2 depicts the performance graph for showing the
Where, result of PSNR value at sender side and receiver side.
Ve2 is the variance of error (between the original and PSNR value is measured in terms of decibel. At the
receiving side, the recovered DC and AC components
denoised image). Brighter regions have a stronger signal are used to reconstruct the image. When channel noise is
due to more light, resulting in higher overall SNR 38 not considered, the image quality keeps improving, in
Calculation of PSNR terms of its PSNR value, as we use more AC
PSNR is the ratio between possible power of a signal components. However, to achieve some degree of
and the power of corrupting noise that affects the compression, some of the AC components, those that
fidelity of its representation. correspond to the high frequencies in the image, can
PSNR in decibels is easily defined from RMSE as given safely be excluded when reconstructing the image. By
below using our proposed technique the PSNR value of
PSNR = 20 log10 (255/RMSE) receiver side is nearly equal to the sender side value.
Where,
1 M N
RMSE  [ I ( x, y)  I ' ( x, y)]2
MN y 1 x 1
where I(x,y) is the original image, I'(x,y) is the
decompressed image and M,N represents dimensions of
the images. A lower value for MSE means lesser error,
and as seen from the inverse relation between the MSE
and PSNR, this translates to a high value of PSNR.
Logically, a higher value of PSNR is good because it
means that the ratio of Signal to Noise is higher. The
signal is the original image, and the noise is the error in
reconstruction. It is highly required to evaluate a
compression scheme having a lower MSE (and a high
PSNR). Figure 3: No. Of Images vs PSNR
V. RESULT AND DISCUSSIONS Figure 3 gives the performance graph for showing the
As a performance measurement, the Peak Signal-to- result of PSNR value at sender side and receiver side
Noise Ratio (PSNR) is calculated for the reconstructed with number of images used. By using our proposed
images at the receiver side. PSNR is metric used to technique the PSNR value of receiver side is nearly
compare two images, the more pixel difference between equal to the sender side value.
the images, the less the PSNR value. It is useful to know
that the human eye does not have enough sensitivity to
detect changes in visual data for PSNR measurements

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VI. CONCLUSION
The use of filter in on transmitted compressed
digital image improves the image quality to a great
extent. Mainly in the case of presence of speckle noise,
filtering is very much required in order to improve the
diagnostic examination and also to improve the
efficiency of post processing techniques like
segmentation. Out of the different filters used, Spatial
Average filter did the best job as far as synthetic image
is concerned. The best result for transmission of
compressed image at the receiver end is obtained with
good image quality. Proposed filter showed better
performance even for the highly dense speckle noise and
its efficiency is based on the selection of homogenous
region. The homogenous region is selected by the user
to arrive the required visual quality for image post
processing analysis. The technique adapted in this work
selects the best filter threshold automatically for a given
image on the basis of statistical parameters and reduces
the burden of the user in selecting appropriate filter for
different types of images
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