Wireless Visual Sensor Networks: Applications, Challenges, and Recent Advances

Wireless visual sensor networks (WVSNs) provide great opportunities to use a large number of low-cost low-resolution camera-equipped sensor nodes to monitor the areas of interest thanks to the rapid development of sensor technology with cost reduction. As compared to traditional wireless sensor networks (WSNs) that can only provide scalar data (e.g., temperature, light, sound, pressure, vibration, etc.), visual data (e.g., image/video) can provide much richer sensing and monitoring information, enabling more applications such as security, military, industrial, medical and environmental monitoring. However, it also introduces new challenges with opportunities. In this paper, we review existing research efforts on the visual sensor coverage/deployment, and visual data capturing/processing/transmission issues in WVSNs, as well as the recent research advances therein. Based on our survey, we identify several future research directions with a number of issues that have not been fully addressed yet. New solutions and schemes are envisioned to be proposed to tackle these issues to better improve the performance for visual sensor coverage and visual data capturing/processing/transmission in WVSNs.