Design of a High-Performance System for Secure Image Communication in the Internet of Things

Image or video exchange over the Internet of Things (IoT) is a requirement in diverse applications, including smart health care, smart structures, and smart transportations. This paper presents a modular and extensible quadrotor architecture and its specific prototyping for automatic tracking applications. The architecture is extensible and based on off-the-shelf components for easy system prototyping. A target tracking and acquisition application is presented in detail to demonstrate the power and flexibility of the proposed design. Complete design details of the platform are also presented. The designed module implements the basic proportional integral derivative control and a custom target acquisition algorithm. Details of the sliding-window-based algorithm are also presented. This algorithm performs 20 x faster than comparable approaches in OpenCV with equal accuracy. Additional modules can be integrated for more complex applications, such as search-and-rescue, automatic object tracking, and traffic congestion analysis. A hardware architecture for the newly introduced Better Portable Graphics (BPG) compression algorithm is also introduced in the framework of the extensible quadrotor architecture. Since its introduction in 1987, the Joint Photographic Experts Group (JPEG) graphics format has been the de facto choice for image compression. However, the new compression technique BPG outperforms the JPEG in terms of compression quality and size of the compressed file. The objective is to present a hardware architecture for enhanced realtime compression of the image. Finally, a prototyping platform of a hardware architecture for a secure digital camera (SDC) integrated with the secure BPG (SBPG) compression algorithm is presented. The proposed architecture is suitable for high-performance imaging in the IoT and is prototyped in Simulink. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first ever proposed hardware architecture for SBPG compression integrated with an SDC.