06/29/2005 09:00 AM
Computer Engineering
Meerkats is a wireless network of battery-operated
camera nodes, that can be used for monitoring and
surveillance of wide areas. This paper describes the
Meerkats architecture, including: (1) a number of
application-level visual sensor acquisition and process-
ing techniques such as image acquisition policies (in-
cluding cooperative, event-driven policies); visual anal-
ysis for event detection, parameter estimation, and
hierarchical representation; (2) resource management
strategies that dynamically assess the power versus
application-level requirements to make decisions on the
tasks to be performed by the system (e.g., what data
representation level to use in transmitting data at a
given point in time); and (3) network-level techniques
for bandwidth- and power-adaptive routing as well as
media scaling.
We also report results from the statistical models we
developed for image acquisition scheduling which, given
a probability of mis-detection, try to minimize power
consumption by deciding when cameras should wake up
and acquire images. We present results from our power
consumption characterization of the Meerkats sensor
node which is based on the Crossbow Stargate [13].
Finally, we describe our visual processing approach
based on motion analysis to perform event detection, mo-
tion orientation, ground plane positioning, and velocity
determination.
