Enabling communication infrastructure and protocol on embedded distributed smart cameras

We present a viable communication infrastructure and protocols to support the versatile data exchange in a network of smart cameras. Each node in network is an embedded smart camera whose hardware/software architecture was carefully designed to meet the performance requirement while providing sufficient flexibility. We introduce a novel scalable clustering approach, which uses asynchronous event exchange among the neighboring camera nodes. The new software-based event exchange structure is integrated into a Hardware Object Request Broker (ORB), which guarantees the real-time performance for transmission in and the seamless design of the network. The empirical results from case studies prove the viability of the proposed event exchange for a set of FPGA-based embedded smart cameras.