Video Quality Analysis of Distributed Video Coding in Wireless Multimedia Sensor Networks

Abstract

Multimedia communications in wireless sensor networks is a very challenging task. Video coding with high computational complexity and great contribution to the energy consumption of nodes and video transmission over erroneous wireless channel are the main reasons of these challenges. Distributed Video Coding has high potential for being deployed in these networks due to its unique features like as independent frame coding and low complexity encoding operations. The purpose of this study is to understand and evaluate the distributed video coding performance facing the transmission characteristics in wireless multimedia sensor networks. To this end, the comparative analysis of the coding in respect of main factors of video transmission (i.e., bit rate and error resiliency) in the Wireless Multimedia Sensor Networks (WMSN) has been done. We have used both the objective and subjective criteria for checking the video quality and applied the Gilbert-Elliot channel model for capturing the bit-level error in WMSN. Therefore, unlike previous works, our results are more realistic. In addition, based on this model we have investigated the impact of protection of frames by Reed-Solomon error control scheme. The results show that paying attention to coding parameters and protecting key frames, have a great impact on increasing the quality of the receiving video and will reduce the energy consumption and delays due to low number of requests from the feedback channel.