A Scalable, Secure, and Energy-Efficient Image Representation for Wireless Systems

Abstract

The recent growth in wireless communications presents a new challenge to multimedia communications. Digital image transmission is a very common form of multimedia communication. Due to limited bandwidth and broadcast nature of the wireless medium, it is necessary to compress and encrypt images before they are sent. On the other hand, it is important to efficiently utilize the limited energy in wireless devices. In a wireless device, two major sources of energy consumption are energy used for computation and energy used for transmission. Computation energy can be reduced by minimizing the time spent on compression and encryption. Transmission energy can be reduced by sending a smaller image file that is obtained by compressing the original highest quality image. Image quality is often sacrificed in the compression process. Therefore, users should have the flexibility to control the image quality to determine whether such a tradeoff is acceptable. It is also desirable for users to have control over image quality in different areas of the image so that less important areas can be compressed more, while retaining the details in important areas. To reduce computations for encryption, a partial encryption scheme can be employed to encrypt only the critical parts of an image file, without sacrificing security. This thesis proposes a scalable and secure image representation scheme that allows users to select different image quality and security levels. The binary space partitioning (BSP) tree presentation is selected because this representation allows convenient compression and scalable encryption. The Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) is chosen as the encryption algorithm because it is fast and secure. Our experimental result shows that our new tree construction method and our pruning formula reduces execution time, hence computation energy, by about 90%. Our image quality prediction model accurately predicts image quality to within 2-3dB of the actual image PSNR.