Joint Effect of Multiple Correlated Cameras in Wireless Multimedia Sensor Networks

Wireless multimedia sensor networks (WMSNs) are interconnected devices that allow retrieving video and audio streams, still images, and scalar data from the environment. In a densely deployed WMSN, there exists correlation among the visual information observed by cameras with overlapped field of views. In this paper, the correlation characteristics of visual information are used to address two issues: 1) how to measure the amount of visual information provided by multiple cameras in the network, and 2) how to select a group of cameras to report their information to the sink under distortion constraints. An entropy-based analytical framework is developed to measure the amount of visual information provided by multiple correlated cameras first. Based on this framework, a correlation-based camera selection scheme is introduced. Simulation results show that, given a distortion bound at the sink, the correlation-based selection scheme requires fewer cameras to report to the sink than the random selection scheme.