The evolution from single to pervasive smart cameras

Having seen increased interest from the research community, smart camera systems have gone through a number of evolutionary steps like from single cameras to distributed smart camera systems with collaboration features. This work aims at defining a taxonomy to classify these systems based on their platform capabilities, the degree of distributed processing as well as system autonomy aspects covering self-configuration and mobility. Existing camera systems are classified according to the proposed taxonomy. Besides capturing the design space for smart cameras, the main contribution of this paper is an overview of the research challenges for the envisioned class of pervasive smart camera systems. As defined in this work, future pervasive smart camera systems will be visual sensor networks targeted at end-user applications where special emphasis is put on unobtrusiveness of the cameras as well as simple deployment supported by self configuration capabilities.

1. INTRODUCTION AND MOTIVATION

Smart cameras have been the subject of study in research and industry for quite some time. While in the 1980s some camera prototypes were developed which integrated sensing with some low-level processing, first commercial “intelligent” cameras appeared in the 1990s. However, the sensing and processing capabilities were very limited on these cameras. In the meantime we have seen dramatic progress in smart camera research and development [1], [2].