Demo: Mouse sensor networks, the smart camera

Abstract

This paper describes an extremely low-cost smart camera with imaging sensor, freely programmable DSP, power control and wired/wireless networking capabilities. The power consumption reaches from 3mW to 240mW depending on load and transmission rates and the BOM for a single device is now 25 euros. We were able to reduce both the power consumption and price by going to minimal resolution imagers (30×30 pixels) allowing us to reduce the performance demands on the DSP engine. The lower resolution, although with processing frame rates of up to 80fps, still allows many common applications for visual sensors such as object detection, fall detection, motion estimation and face detection. In addition, the resolution is low enough to guarantee privacy.