Hierarchical Trellis Based Decoder for Total Variation Sequence Detection (TVSD) in Space-Time Trellis Coded (STTC) Wireless Image/Video Communication

This paper proposes a robust reconstruction scheme for image/video transmission in space-time trellis coding (STTC) based MIMO wireless multimedia sensor networks (WMSN). The information bits of the image/video stream are modulated using STTC prior to transmission over the MIMO wireless channel between the multimedia sensors and the cluster head. At the receiver, a novel total variation sequence detector (TVSD) is developed that employs an anisotropic total variation (TV) regularized cost function to leverage the bounded variation property of the image/video stream, in addition to the coding and diversity advantages of the STTC, for improved image/video recovery. For reconstruction, a novel bi-layered hierarchical trellis based modified Viterbi decoder is developed to decode the optimal bit sequence corresponding to the least TV cost function using appropriately modified node and branch metrics. Simulation results using several test images and video sequences demonstrate the improved reconstruction performance of the proposed scheme, especially in the low SNR regime (0 - 10 dB), in comparison to the conventional maximum likelihood (ML) decoder, which makes it ideally suited for implementation in practical WMSN.