Reliable continuous object tracking with cost effectiveness in wireless sensor networks

For monitoring of a large-scale continuous object, a large number of sensor nodes might be participated with object detection and tracking. In order to reduce huge quantities of data from the sensor nodes, previous studies focus on representative selection for data reporting to a sink. However, they simply choose representatives among a large number of sensor nodes without consideration of node deployment environments and detection accuracy. Hence, this paper proposes a novel object tracking scheme that first makes a set of candidates which are able to show the accurate boundary shape, and then chooses a small number of representatives in the set. Moreover, since the scheme also considers object alteration for representative selection, it can provide high energy-efficiency despite reducing data reporting.