Dynamic Node Collaboration for Mobile Target Tracking in Wireless Camera Sensor Networks

Compared to the other types of sensor networks, the wireless camera sensor networks can offer much more comprehensive and accurate information in mobile target tracking applications. We propose a dynamic node collaboration scheme for mobile target tracking in wireless camera sensor networks. Unlike the traditional sensing models, we develop a nonlinear localization-oriented sensing model for camera sensors by taking the perspective projection and the observation noises into account. Based on our sensing model, we apply the sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) technique to estimate the belief state of the target location. In order to implement the SMC based tracking mechanism efficiently, we propose a dynamic node collaboration scheme, which can balance the tradeoff between the quality of tracking and the network cost. Our scheme deploys the dynamic cluster architecture which mainly includes the following two components. First, we design a scheme to elect the cluster heads during the tracking process. Second, we develop an optimization-based algorithm to select an optimal subset of camera sensors as the cluster members for estimating the target location cooperatively. Also conducted is a set of extensive simulations to validate and evaluate our proposed schemes.