Moving Towards Massively Scalable Video-Based Sensor Networks
Wu‐chi Feng, Jonathan Walpole, Calton Pu, Wu-chang Feng · PDXScholar (Portland State University) · 2001
Networking and computing technologies are becoming advanced enough to enable a wealth of diverse applications that will drastically change our everyday lives. Some past examples of these developments include the World Wide Web and wireless data networking infrastructures. As is quite obvious, the World Wide Web has enabled a fundamental change in the way many people deal with day-to-day tasks. Through the web, one can now make on-line reservations for travel, pay bills through on-line banking services, and view personalized on-line newscasts. More recently, developments in wireless technologies have enabled anywhere, anytime access to information over wireless medium. As wireless technologies such as 3G continue to advance, the ability to support larger bandwidth applications will become possible. Sensor networks are becoming a fairly hot area of research where the main focus is the development of networking technologies that support potentially thousands of sensors placed in a chosen environment [Estrin99]. Thus far, the sensors that have been described in the literature (and in some limited use) typically measure simple things such as humidity, temperature, or pressure. This results in a fairly limited amount of data generated, even over thousands of sensors. Now, if we look ten years into the future when video capture devices will most likely be small and inexpensive (with limited processing capabilities), the ability to create video-based sensor networks will be possible. Video-based sensor networks can be used for a great number of applications that would undoubtedly revolutionize the way we go about our day-to-day lives.