DSCAgents: A lightweight middleware for distributed smart cameras

This paper investigates on middleware for distributed smart cameras. We describe DSCAgents, our agent-oriented lightweight middleware system. The design goal is to provide a modular and flexible middleware that takes into account the underlying hardware platform and also supports collaborative image processing. Mobile agents are used to model image processing tasks and to manage the whole smart camera network. The agent-oriented approach simplifies application development and domain specific services unburden programmers from implementing the same functionality for each application again. Mobility of agents allows to build highly dynamic and adaptive systems where image processing tasks can move from one camera to another during operation. The evaluation of DSCAgents shows reasonable performance while keeping the resource requirements low.