Cooperative relay tracking with multiple mobile camera sensors

Abstract

Camera Sensor Networks (CSNs) has been deployed for many applications of video surveillance. In urban road or large buildings, camera sensors are deployed in public places for social security, and target tracking is a typical application of CSNs. Recently, development in electronic technology and image sensors makes it possible to deploy mobile cameras in CSNs. Since mobile camera sensors can move toward target to achieve a close and high quality monitoring, we propose to track the target with mobile cameras. Due to the constraints of limited sensing range, it is necessary for mobile cameras to cooperate with each other to improve tracking quality and reduce moving distance. In this paper, a cooperative relay tracking problem is proposed and proved to be NP-hard. We proposed a novel cooperative relay method for mobile cameras based on expected values (a selection metric) with several provable properties, which can shorten the total moving distance of cameras and ensure a continuous tracking for mobile target. The effectiveness of the proposed method is validated by extensive simulation results, which shows that the total moving distance of cameras can be obviously reduced while guaranteeing continuous tracking.