SCmesh: Solar-Powered Wireless Smart Camera Mesh Network

Wireless visual sensor networks find a wide range of applications such as environment and habitat monitoring, object tracking, surveillance, etc. Unlike sensor networks targeting telemetry applications, which typically use "scalar" sensors, visual sensor networks produce richer, multi-media information and therefore raise additional challenges related to efficient use of energy-, node-, and network-resources. In this paper, we introduce SCmesh, a mesh network of solar-powered wireless camera nodes. Using SCmesh, low-cost, solar-powered, visual sensing nodes are able to transfer video files as well as collaborate on tasks such as visual processing, event detection, object tracking, etc. SCmesh allows node-to-node, as well as scoped- or full broadcast communication. We deploy SCmesh in a smart visual sensor network deployment and showcase its functionality and performance.