Bandwidth Adaptive Image Communication via Similarity Based Auto-Selection

In image acquisition and communication systems on small or micro platforms, such as small satellite or unmanned aerial vehicle platforms, the imaging system can generate huge amount of image data while communication system can only deliver a very small part of them due to the limited communication bandwidth. In this paper, a novel bandwidth adaptive image communication strategy via similarity based auto-selection is designed to select a certain number of most informative images acquired by the imaging system for transmission, where the number of selected images is adaptive to the communication bandwidth. Specifically, the image that is more distinguishing to previously transmitted images measured by the similarity, instead of the instantly acquired image, is selected. Experimental results on simulated image sequence has demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed bandwidth adaptive image communication algorithm.