VideoWeb: Design of a wireless camera network for real-time monitoring of activities

Sensor networks have been a very active area of research in recent years. However, most of the sensors used in the development of these networks have been local and non-imaging sensors such as acoustics, seismic, vibration, temperature, humidity, etc. The development of emerging video sensor networks poses its own set of unique challenges, including high bandwidth and low latency requirements for real-time processing and control. This paper presents a systematic approach for the design, implementation, and evaluation of a large-scale, software-reconfigurable, wireless camera network, suitable for a variety of practical real-time applications. We take into consideration issues related to the hardware, software, control, architecture, network connectivity, performance evaluation, and data processing strategies for the network. We perform multi-objective optimization on settings such as video resolution and compression quality to provide insight into the performance trade-offs when configuring such a network.