Internet of Video Things: Next-Generation IoT With Visual Sensors

The worldwide flourishing of the Internet of Things (IoT) in the past decade has enabled numerous new applications through the internetworking of a wide variety of devices and sensors. More recently, visual sensors have seen their considerable booming in IoT systems because they are capable of providing richer and more versatile information. Internetworking of large-scale visual sensors has been named Internet of Video Things (IoVT). IoVT has its own unique characteristics in terms of sensing, transmission, storage, and analysis, which are fundamentally different from the conventional IoT. These new characteristics of IoVT are expected to impose significant challenges to existing technical infrastructures. In this article, an overview of recent advances in various fronts of IoVT will be introduced and a broad range of technological and system challenges will be addressed. Several emerging IoVT applications will be discussed briefly to illustrate the potentials of IoVT in a broad range of practical scenarios.