Abstract
One goal of surveillance systems is to collect information about the behavior and position of interested targets in sensing environments. These systems can find applications in fire emergency, security, smart home and agriculture. Recently, surveillance systems combining wireless sensor networks with inexpensive web cameras or high quality Pan-Tilt-Zoom (PTZ) cameras have become more and more popular. In traditional video surveillance systems, a number of video cameras are required in order to achieve a desirable system performance. Another shortcoming is that it is not easy to adapt to environmental variations. In this paper, we proposed and implemented an integrated real time video surveillance system consisting of a large number of low cost sensors with a few wireless video cameras. The system allows a group of cooperating sensor devices to detect and track the positions of mobile objects and to report the results to sink nodes in a sensing environment. Then the sink nodes can control the video cameras for taking images of these events to display the present situations. We also propose a camera control scheme to better cover the sensing area and to support coverage allocation of the video cameras. We have implemented the proposed system with 16 sensor nodes and two PTZ wireless video cameras to evaluate the system performance. The result shows that our surveillance system is adaptable to various environments and is capable of providing real time information of the monitored environment