Reliable Event-Detection in Wireless Visual Sensor Networks Through Scalar Collaboration and Game-Theoretic Consideration

In this work we consider an event-driven wireless visual sensor network (WVSN) comprised of untethered camera nodes and scalar sensors deployed in a hostile environment. In the event-driven paradigm, each camera node transmits a surveillance frame to the cluster-head only if an event of interest was captured in the frame, for energy and bandwidth conservation. We thus examine a simple image processing algorithm at the camera nodes based on difference frames and the chi-squared detector. We show that the test statistic of the chi-squared detector is equivalent to that of a robust (non-parametric) detector and that this simple algorithm performs well on indoor surveillance sequences and some, but not all, outdoor sequences. In outdoor sequences containing significant changes in background and lighting, this simple detector may produce a high probability of error and benefits from the inclusion of scalar sensor decisions. The scalar sensor decisions are, however, prone to attack and may exhibit errors that are arbitrarily frequent, pervasive throughout the network and difficult to predict. To achieve attack prediction and mitigation given an attacker whose actions are not known a priori, we employ game-theoretic analysis. We show that the scalar sensor error can be controlled through cluster-head checking and appropriate selection of cluster size n. Given this attack mitigation, we employ real-life sequences to determine the total probability of error when individual and combined decisions are utilized and we discuss the ensuing ramifications and performance issues.