Compressed Pseudo-Analog Transmission System for Remote Sensing Images over Bandwidth-Constrained Wireless Channels

Recently, pseudo-analog transmission based on SoftCast has been proposed to improve the received quality of video/image by eliminating the cliff effect in traditional digital transmission. In this paper, we propose a Compressed Pseudo-analog Transmission System (ComPaTS) for remote sensing images over bandwidth-constrained wireless channels. This novel scheme is developed based on the observation that the inherent dropping strategy in pseudo-analog transmission is impractical for remote sensing images in which the transmission bandwidth is generally insufficient. In ComPaTS, to guarantee the content diversity gain under pseudo-analog transmission, block-based Compressive Sensing (CS) is applied to the wavelet domain of each remote sensing image, where the sampling ratio is proportional to the importance of different blocks. The main work of ComPaTS is to leverage the sampling ratio in block-based CS and the resource allocation in pseudo-analog transmission in order to minimize system distortion. Two components of system distortion, i.e., source distortion and channel distortion are analyzed respectively. To characterize the coupling relationship between these two different types of distortion, a joint bandwidth-power distortion optimization problem is formulated. Furthermore, we also propose a two-stage allocation algorithm to solve the problem efficiently. The simulation results demonstrate that the proposed ComPaTS scheme significantly outperforms reference schemes in terms of peak signal-to-noise ratio under different bandwidth-constrained scenarios.