A CMOS image sensor with low-complexity video compression for wireless sensor networks

The aim of this paper is to present and evaluate a smart image sensor integrating an efficient video compression scheme designed to respect the energy constraints of image processing and transmission over WSNs (Wireless Sensor Networks). The interest of our single chip solution is twofold: first, compression settings can be changed at run time depending on video characteristics; second, compression is applied only on blocks that change significantly over time. The compressed blocks will be transmitted over the vision-based sensor network. This paper presents in details the hardware architecture of the proposed system and describes its performances, with relevant comparisons to some related works.