Pannable and fixed camera interactions for enhanced surveillance applications with wireless image sensors

This paper introduces image sensor nodes with pannable camera capabilities as a cheap and tractable form of visual sensor mobility for surveillance applications based on untethered sensors. The motivation behind pannable cameras is that as they rotate their real sensing range moves from a FoV coverage to a disk coverage, therefore allowing neighboring nodes to decrease their activity level, thus their energy consumption. As a sensor node´s activity is based on a criticality or risk approach, we proposed 2 interaction behaviors between fixed and pannable camera nodes to dynamically adapt the activity level without decrease the surveillance quality. The performance of the interaction models is evaluated through simulation. The results show that pannable cameras can successfully help to increase the network lifetime but, depending on the number of deployed pannable cameras, care must be taken with the interaction behaviors to not decrease the detection quality.