An efficient image gathering scheme with quality control in disaster

Rescue teams require information about victims in need of help rapidly to improve survival rate at the time of disaster. Emergency Rescue Information Sharing System gathers and provides the information with a framework called METHANE in addition to efficient wireless link's selection using OpenFlow. However, it is difficult for those who rescue the victims except for the rescue teams to recognize detail situation of disaster area by using only METHANE information. To gather and provide the information rapidly, we introduce information about disaster area such as image information in addition to METHANE framework. However, transmission of the image information affects transmission of METHANE information in unstable network at the time of disaster. In this paper, we propose a transmission scheme using quality modification of image information. This scheme aims to gather high quality image information rapidly without affecting the transmission of METHANE information. To enable the transmission of the image information without affecting the transmission of METHANE, we distinguish flows of contents and assign different wireless links to each content. Moreover, for rapid image information gathering, we select the links dynamically based on available bandwidth and modify quality of information. Prototype demonstration shows that proposed scheme has usefulness in terms of rapid collection of low quality image information as well as slow collection of high quality image information.