This paper describes a progressive data compression algorithm for subsea gray-level image (data) transmission through a low rate ultrasonic link in a telerobotics system. The proposed image compression algorithm is based on JPEG, and has been modified for a specific subsea application, where the communication bit rate is confined to 100–200 bits/s and a frequent updating of reconstructed images is required.
The experimental result based on 23 real imagesshows that the proposed image data compression algorithmperforms better than JPEG when images are reconstructed from asmall amount of data. The transmission error effect andcomputational complexity have also been analysed with respect tothe proposed algorithm.
gray-level image - progressive image compression - ultrasonic link - telerobotic application