Camera selection in visual sensor networks

Wireless networks of visual sensors have recently emerged as a new type of sensor-based intelligent system, with performance and complexity challenges that go beyond that of existing wireless sensor networks. The goal of the visual sensor network we examine is to provide a user with visual information from any arbitrary viewpoint within the monitored field. This can be accomplished by synthesizing image data from a selection of cameras whose fields of view overlap with the desired field of view. In this work, we compare two methods for the selection of the camera-nodes. The first method selects cameras that minimize the difference between the images provided by the selected cameras and the image that would be captured by a real camera from the desired viewpoint. The second method considers the energy limitations of the battery powered camera-nodes, as well as their importance in the 3D coverage preservation task. Simulations using both metrics for camera-node selection show a clear trade-off between the quality of the reconstructed image and the network's ability to provide full coverage of the monitored 3D space for a longer period of time.