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A comparative analysis of video codecs for multihop wireless video sensor networks

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Abstract

Wireless video sensor networks (WVSNs) have drawn significant attention in recent years due to the advent of low-cost miniaturized cameras, which makes it feasible to realize large-scale WVSNs for a variety of applications including security surveillance, environmental tracking, and health monitoring. However, the conventional video coding paradigms are not suitable for WVSNs due to resource constraints such as limited computation power, battery energy, and network bandwidth. In this paper, we evaluated and analyzed the performance of video codecs based on emerging video coding paradigms such as distributed video coding and distributed compressive video sensing for multihop WVSNs. The main objective of this work was to provide an insight into the computational (encoding/decoding) complexity, energy consumption, node and network lifetime, processing and memory requirements, and the quality of reconstruction of these video codecs. Based on the findings, this paper also provides some guidelines for the selection of appropriate video codecs for a given WVSN application.

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Notes

  1. A configurable setting GOP (Group of Pictures) determines the distance between key frames in the video sequence, and thus the coding efficiency. For example, if GOP = m, there will be one key frame for every m-1 non-key frames (also referred to as WZ frames).

  2. NRZ encoding uses two voltage levels to represent a digital signal. A positive and negative voltage represents a binary one, and zero, respectively. NRZ encoding needs much less bandwidth than Manchester encoding for a given bit rate.

  3. NCFSK is a specialized non-coherent orthogonal modulation technique that has no phase relationship between consecutive elements of signal, i.e. phase varies randomly.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Engineering, Auckland University of Technology, Auckland, New Zealand

    Noreen Imran, Boon-Chong Seet & Alvis C. M. Fong

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  1. Noreen Imran
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  2. Boon-Chong Seet
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  3. Alvis C. M. Fong
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Correspondence to Noreen Imran.

Additional information

Communicated by T. Haenselmann.

This paper is an extended version of our previous work presented in IEEE PACRIM 2011 [1].

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Imran, N., Seet, BC. & Fong, A.C.M. A comparative analysis of video codecs for multihop wireless video sensor networks. Multimedia Systems 18, 373–389 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00530-012-0258-0

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