Energy Efficient Content Based Image Retrieval in Sensor Networks

The presence of increased memory and computational power in imaging sensor networks attract researchers to exploit image processing algorithms on distributed memory and computational power. In this paper, a typical perimeter is investigated with a number of sensors placed to form an image sensor network for the purpose of content based distributed image search. Image search algorithm is used to enable distributed content based image search within each sensor node. The energy model is presented to calculate energy efficiency for various cases of image search and transmission. The simulations are carried out based on consideration of continuous monitoring or event driven activity on the perimeter. The simulation setups consider distributed image processing on sensor nodes and results show that energy saving is significant if search algorithms are embedded in image sensor nodes and image processing is distributed across sensor nodes. The tradeoff between sensor life time, distributed image search and network deployed cost is also investigated.