Toward Battery-free Smart Cameras

Conventional wireless camera systems and the computations running on them for machine vision applications are demanding power-wise. The battery life of wearable camera systems (such as Google Glass) is under an hour when operating with full capacity. Similarly, due to power requirements, surveillance cameras need to be plugged in, which decreases their reliability because cutting the wire would totally disable the camera. In addition, it limits their deployment to places that have access to power wires. My recent work (WISPCam) enabled battery-free image capture by harvesting energy from Radio Frequency signals, but there is a long wait time between receiving consecutive images due to the large power consumption of the camera. The proposed work would extend from my current projects to explore reasons causing cameras to consume significant amount of power and presents ways to eliminate them. In addition, this proposal presents some novel techniques to reduce wearable camera systems' power consumption by exploring low-power hardware architectures and algorithms.