Very low complexity low rate image coding for the wireless endoscope

Abstract

When designing coding algorithms for the wireless endoscope, achieving good performance with very low complexity is of great importance. This is due to the fact that hardware implementation is much constrained by the small size of the endoscope capsule and available power is also very limited. In this paper, we propose a very low complexity image coder for the wireless endoscope which operates within these constraints, with special emphasis on low bit rate performance. The scheme encodes the captured images frame-by-frame using simple DPCM (Differential Pulse Coded Modulation) coding, combined with multi-rate processing, dead-zone quantization and efficient run-length coding of the quantization indices. Simulation results show that proposed coder is able to meet our objectives.