Date of Award

Fall 2013

Degree Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Electrical and Computer Engineering

First Advisor

Johnny Park

Committee Chair

Johnny Park

Committee Co-Chair

Hong Z. Tan

Committee Member 1

Henry Medeiros

Committee Member 2

Mireille Boutin

Abstract

The proliferation of miniaturized low-power computing devices, advances in wireless communications, and the availability of inexpensive imaging sensors have enabled the development of wireless camera networks (WCN). In this dissertation, we consider the problem of real-time object tracking with a WCN. Existing object tracking methods designed for multi-camera systems do not take into account the unique constraints of WCNs. Specifically, an effective object tracking system for WCNs must anticipate unreliable network communication, limited memory, and limited computational power in each camera node. In particular, unreliable communication degrades the quality of the visual information shared by the cameras, which ultimately degrades the tracking performance in the network. We present a novel resource-aware framework for the implementation of distributed particle filters in resource-constrained WCNs. Our method focuses on the effects of communication failures on object tracking performance by adjusting the amount of data packets generated and transmitted by the cameras according to the network conditions. We demonstrate the performance of the proposed framework using three different mechanisms to share the particle information among nodes: synchronized particles, Gaussian mixture models, and Parzen windows. We show that all three approaches benefit from the proposed resource-aware mechanism in terms of tracking accuracy or energy efficiency.

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