Image Compression for Wireless Sensor Network: A Model Segmentation-Based Compressive Autoencoder

Aiming at the problems of image quality, compression performance, and transmission efficiency of image compression in wireless sensor networks (WSN), a model segmentation-based compressive autoencoder (MS-CAE) is proposed. In the proposed algorithm, we first divide each image in the dataset into pixel blocks and design a novel deep image compression network with a compressive autoencoder to form a compressed feature map by encoding pixel blocks. Then, the reconstructed image is obtained by using the quantized coefficients of the quantizer and splicing the decoded feature maps in order. Finally, the deep network model is segmented into two parts: the encoding network and the decoding network. The weight parameters of the encoding network are deployed to the edge device for the compressed image in the sensor network. For high-quality reconstructed images, the weight parameters of the decoding network are deployed to the cloud system. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed MS-CAE obtains a high signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) for the details of the image, and the compression ratio at the same bit per pixel (bpp) is significantly higher than that of the compared image compression algorithms. It also indicates that the MS-CAE not only greatly relieves the pressure of the hardware system in sensor network but also effectively improves image transmission efficiency and solves the deployment problem of image monitoring in remote and energy-poor areas.