A New Approach to Image Compression in Industrial Internet of Things

Applying image sensors in automation of Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) technology is on the rise, day by day. In such companies, a large number of high volume images are transmitted at any moment; therefore, a significant challenge is reducing the amount of transmitted information and consequently bandwidth without reducing the quality of images. Image compression in sensors, in this regard, will save bandwidth and speed up data transmitting. There are several pieces of research in image compression for sensor networks, but, according to the nature of image transfer in IIoT, there is no study in this particular field. In this paper, it is for the first time that a new reusable technique to improve productivity in image compression is introduced and applied. To do this, a new adaptive lossy compression technique to compact sensor-generated images in IIoT by using K- Means++ and Intelligent Embedded Coding (IEC) as our novel approach, is presented. The new method is based on the colour of pixels so that pixels with the same or nearly the same colours are clustered around a centroid and finally, the colour of the pixels will be encoded. The experiments are based on a reputable image dataset from a real smart greenhouse; i.e. KOMATSUNA. The evaluation results reveal that, with the same compression rate, our approach compresses images with higher quality in comparison with other methods such as K-means, fuzzy C-means and fuzzy C-means++ clustering.