CG-Cast: Scalable Wireless Image SoftCast Using Compressive Gradient

G-Cast is a wireless visual communication scheme that conveys visual information via image gradient. It is inspired by the characteristics of human vision systems and can provide improved perceptual quality. G-Cast is power efficient but bandwidth demanding, because gradient data has double size of the original image. This paper presents a scheme named CGCast for scalable image transmission in bandwidth-limited wireless scenarios. It employs a compressive-gradient based image representation to describe perceptually sensitive image details and reduce bandwidth requirement at the same time, combining gradient-based visual representation with compressive sensing techniques. The compressive gradient data is transmitted in pseudo-analog way so that it achieves elegant quality transition in a wide channel signal-to-noise ratio (CSNR) range. CG-Cast also sends a small set of low-frequency data in digital way, to provide the global and local luminance of the image. We developed an effective optimization algorithm for the decoder to reconstruct the original image from the received noisy compressive gradient and the low-frequency part of the image. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed scheme improves the quality of received images remarkably under different CSNR and channel bandwidth conditions. IEEE