Energy-efficient relay tracking with multiple mobile camera sensors

Camera Sensor Networks (CSNs) has been deployed for many applications of video surveillance. In urban road or large buildings, camera sensors are deployed in public places for social security, and target tracking is a typical application of CSNs. Recently, development in electronic technology and image sensors makes it possible to deploy mobile cameras in CSNs. Due to the constraints of limited sensing range, it is necessary for mobile cameras to cooperate with each other to improve tracking quality and reduce moving distance. In this paper, a cooperative relay tracking problem is proposed and proved to be NP-hard. For single target tracking, we design a cooperative relay algorithm, which can shorten the total moving distance of cameras and ensure a continuous tracking for mobile target. Moreover, different from single target tracking problem, we design a genetic algorithm to obtain an available schedule for tracking multiple targets. The effectiveness of the proposed methods are validated by extensive simulation results, which shows that the energy consumed by cameras can be obviously reduced while guaranteeing continuous tracking.