Quality aware image transmission over underwater multimedia sensor networks

With the recent advances in Micro Electro-Mechanical Systems (MEMS) and underwater imaging sensors, and cameras, underwater multimedia sensor networks (UMSNs) have been proposed and drawn the immediate attention of the research community. Underwater multimedia sensor networks enable several new applications, such as target tracking, advanced coastal multimedia surveillance, undersea explorations, image acquisition and classification, environmental monitoring, and disaster prevention. However, the practical realization of these currently designed and envisioned applications directly depends on reliable and quality-aware communication capabilities of the deployed UMSNs. This paper presents a comprehensive performance evaluation of error concealment and error correction algorithms for quality-aware image transmission over UMSNs. Specifically, different combinations of multipath transport,watermarking-based error concealment (EC), forward error correction (FEC) and adaptive retransmission mechanisms have been evaluated to combat underwater channel impairments and mitigate packet losses due to node failures and intrinsic underwater acoustic channel characteristics. In addition, two novel image quality assessment metrics have been proposed to obtain the predicted quality of the image depending on the channel and node failures. Comparative performance evaluations show that the EC approach reconstructs the distorted image as closely as the original one while avoiding the burden of retransmissions and consequent delay. 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.