Video Compression Method for On-Board Systems of Construction Robots

This paper describes the experiences relating to transmission of digital video information from an on-board video camera of inspection wall climbing robots. The decoder is modified in the proposed transmission scheme. The main difference with the conventional scheme is an interaction of the reference frame with the post-processing. If video coding and post-processing algorithms are available, proposed modifications can be implemented almost without additional expenses. According to experiments, the method can increase efficiency of existing post-processing methods up to 40% in terms of the peak signal to noise ratio improvement. It is based on general video encoding principles and does not depend on particular implementation of the video codec and on post-processing implementation. The method can be used with standard video codecs like MPEG-1 or MPEG-4, and with variety of known post-processing algorithms. The main advantages of the proposed method are implementation simplicity and possibility to increase efficiency of the on-board inspection systems of autonomous mobile construction robots.