A prototype node for wireless vision sensor network applications development

This paper presents a prototype vision-enabled sensor node based on a commercial vision system of reduced size and power consumption. The wireless infrastructure for the deployment of a distributed smart camera network based on these nodes is provided by commercial motes. The smart camera, based on a low-power bio-inspired processing scheme, enables in-node image processing and vision tools. This permits to elaborate a lighter representation of the scene, keeping the relevant information in terms of detected elements, features and events, alleviating the data transmission through the network. Therefore by passing only the relevant information to the neighboring sensor nodes, distributed and collaborative vision is possible with the limited data rates available in commercial wireless sensor networks. Communication between the different components of the system is supported by the available UARTs and GPIOs. Several examples of in-node image processing and feature detection has been tested in the prototype, and information at different abstraction levels has been broadcasted to the network.