A Smart Camera Mote Architecture for Distributed Intelligent Surveillance

Surveillance is one of the promising applications to which smart camera motes forming a vision-enabled network can add increasing levels of intelligence. We see a high degree of in-node processing in combination with distributed reasoning algorithms as the key enablers for such intelligent surveillance systems. To put these systems into practice still requires a considerable amount of research ranging from mote architectures, pixel-processing algorithms, up to distributed reasoning engines. This paper introduces an energy-efficient smart camera mote architecture that has been designed with intelligent surveillance as the target application in mind. Special attention is given to its unique vision system: a low-resolution stereo-vision system continuously determines position, range, and size of moving objects entering its field of view. This information triggers a color camera module to acquire a high-resolution image sub-array containing the object, which can be efficiently processed. The paper also presents a basic power model that estimates lifetime of our smart camera mote in batterypowered operation for intelligent surveillance event processing.