Contribution to the design of a CMOS image sensor with low-complexity video compression for wireless sensor networks

Demand for low-power sensing devices with integrated image processing capabilities is increasing, especially for resource-constrained systems such as WSNs. CMOS technology enables the integration of image sensing and image processing, which improves the overall system performance. The aim of this paper is to present and evaluate a smart image sensor integrating a user-driven video compression scheme designed to respect the energy constraints of image processing and transmission over WSNs. The interest of our 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. This paper presents in details the internal hardware architecture of the proposed system and describes its performance, with relevant comparisons to some related works.