Improved Agent-Oriented Middleware for Distributed Smart Cameras

In the recent past, much effort has been put into the development of distributed vision systems with smart cameras as key components. Smart cameras combine video sensing, processing and communication within a single embedded device and provide sufficient on-board infrastructure to carry out high-level video analysis tasks. Networks of smart cameras help to overcome some hard problems inherent to single-camera systems by providing multiple views of a scene. This paper reports on an improved, agent-oriented middleware for embedded smart cameras. Each image processing task is represented by an agent resident on a smart camera within the network. Agents are able to move from one camera to another as needed during run-time. An agent is comprised of the high-level application logic and the image processing algorithm which is executed on the processing unit. The presented middleware is also designed for distributed image processing where two or more cameras can cooperate for a single task. In the paper we discuss the requirements for such an agent-oriented middleware capable of supporting distributed image processing. Further, we describe the architecture of our middleware implementation. The evaluation of our current middleware implementation shows significant performance improvements compared to our previous Java-based implementation.