Distributed collaborative camera actuation for redundant data elimination in wireless multimedia sensor networks

Given the high cost of processing and communicating the multimedia data in wireless multimedia sensor networks (WMSNs), it is important to reduce possible data redundancy. Therefore, camera sensors should only be actuated when an event is detected within their vicinity. In the meantime, the coverage of the event should not be compromised. In this paper, we propose a low-cost distributed actuation scheme which strives to turn on the least number of cameras to avoid possible redundancy in the multimedia data while still providing the necessary event coverage. The basic idea of this scheme is the collaboration of camera sensors that have heard from scalar sensors about an occurring event to minimize the possible coverage overlaps. This is done by either counting the number of scalar sensors or determining the event boundaries with scalar sensors. Through simulation, we show how the distributed scheme performs in terms of coverage under several centralized and random deployment schemes. We also compare the performance with the case when all the cameras in the vicinity are actuated and when blockages in the region exist. (C) 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.