Date of Award

8-8-2017

Degree Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Computer Science

First Advisor

Anu G. Bourgeois

Abstract

Camera Sensor Networks (CSNs) have emerged as an information-rich sensing modality with many potential applications and have received much research attention over the past few years. One of the major challenges in research for CSNs is that camera sensors are different from traditional scalar sensors, as different cameras from different positions can form distinct views of the object in question. As a result, simply combining the sensing range of the cameras across the field does not necessarily form an effective camera coverage, since the face image (or the targeted aspect) of the object may be missed. The angle between the object's facing direction and the camera's viewing direction is used to measure the quality of sensing in CSNs instead. This distinction makes the coverage verification and deployment methodology dedicated to conventional sensor networks unsuitable.

A new coverage model called full-view coverage can precisely characterize the features of coverage in CSNs. An object is full-view covered if there is always a camera to cover it no matter which direction it faces and the camera's viewing direction is sufficiently close to the object's facing direction. In this dissertation, we consider three areas of research for CSNS: 1. an analytical theory for full-view coverage; 2. energy efficiency issues in full-view coverage CSNs; 3. Multi-dimension full-view coverage theory. For the first topic, we propose a novel analytical full-view coverage theory, where the set of full-view covered points is produced by numerical methodology. Based on this theory, we solve the following problems. First, we address the full-view coverage holes detection problem and provide the healing solutions. Second, we propose $k$-Full-View-Coverage algorithms in camera sensor networks. Finally, we address the camera sensor density minimization problem for triangular lattice based deployment in full-view covered camera sensor networks, where we argue that there is a flaw in the previous literature, and present our corresponding solution. For the second topic, we discuss lifetime and full-view coverage guarantees through distributed algorithms in camera sensor networks. Another energy issue we discuss is about object tracking problems in full-view coverage camera sensor networks. Next, the third topic addresses multi-dimension full-view coverage problem where we propose a novel 3D full-view coverage model, and we tackle the full-view coverage optimization problem in order to minimize the number of camera sensors and demonstrate a valid solution.

This research is important due to the numerous applications for CSNs. Especially some deployment can be in remote locations, it is critical to efficiently obtain accurate meaningful data.

DOI

https://doi.org/10.57709/10599445

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