Building low-cost wireless image sensor networks: from single camera to multi-camera system

Wireless Image Sensor Networks (WISN) where sensor nodes are equipped with miniaturized visual CMOS cameras to provide visual information is a promising technology for situation awareness, search&rescue or intrusion detection applications. In this paper, we present an off-the-shelf image sensor based on Arduino boards with a CMOS uCamII camera. The image sensor works with raw 128×128 image, implements an image change detection mechanism based on simple-differencing technique and integrates a packet loss-tolerant image compression technique that can run on very limited memory platforms. We detail the performance and energy consumption measures of the various image platforms and highlight how both medium-end and low-end platforms can be supported. From the single-camera system, we describe the extension to a multi-camera system which provides omnidirectional sensing at a very lost cost for large-scale deployment.