Pruned discrete Tchebichef transform for image coding in wireless multimedia sensor networks

After the successful development of the discrete cosine transform (DCT) especially in audio, image and video coding, many state-of-the-arts DCT-based fast algorithms have been developed. However, these algorithms are floating-point and are implemented with high algorithmic complexity and memory intensive. Therefore, they consume large system resources. In particular, those requirements pose a serious limitation on multimedia applications in resource-constrained systems, such as wireless multimedia sensor networks (WMSNs). In this paper we investigate an alternative to DCT transform which known as discrete Tchebichef transform (DTT). Despite its good energy compaction property, low algorithmic complexity and low memory requirements, the DTT is potentially unexploited in the literature. To further reduce its complexity and memory requirements, in this paper we propose a pruned version of DTT (P-DTT). Simulation results show that P-DTT requires a reduced number of arithmetic operations, energy consumption and memory. And it has at the same time competitive compression efficiency compared with Loeffler-DCT and exact DTT. The proposed P-DTT transform is a viable option for image compression and/or communication over WMSNs.