Light-Weight Contour Tracking in Wireless Sensor Networks

We study the problem of contour tracking with binary sensors, an important problem for monitoring spatial signals and tracking group targets. In particular, we track the boundaries of the blobs of interest and capture the topological changes as the blobs merge or split. Only the nodes on the boundaries of these deformable blobs stay active and the repair cost is proportional to the size of the contour changes. Our algorithm is completely distributed, requires only local information, and yet captures the global topological properties. The algorithm performs a fundamental monitoring function and is a foundation for further information processing of spatial sensor data.