SensEye - Multi-Tier, Multi-Modal Camera Sensor Network


Overview

The relentless pace of technological growth has led to the emergence of a variety of sensors and networked sensor platforms. Today, networked sensors span the spectrum of cost, form-factor, resolution, and functionality. As an example, consider camera sensors, where available products range from expensive pan-tilt-zoom cameras to high-resolution digital cameras, and from inexpensive web-cams and ``cell-phone-class'' cameras to tiny cameras such as Cyclops. A similar set of options are becoming available for sensor platforms, with choices ranging from embedded PCs to PDA-class Stargates , and from low-power Motes to even lower power systems-on-a-chip.

Multi-tier multi-modal networks (henceforth, M^2 networks) provide an interesting balance of cost, coverage, functionality, and reliability. For instance, the lower tier of such a system can employ cheap, untethered elements that can provide dense coverage with low reliability. However, reliability concerns can be mitigated by seeding such a network with a few expensive, more reliable sensors at a higher tier to compensate for the variability in the lower tier. Similarly, a mix of low-fidelity, low-cost sensors and high-fidelity high-cost sensor can be used to achieve a balance between cost and functionality. Application performance can also be improved by exploiting alternate sensing modalities that may reduce energy requirements without sacrificing system reliability.

The SensEye architecture

Papers

People

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Funding

This work was supported in part by National Science Foundation grants EEC-0313747, CNS-0219520 and EIA-0098060.