Skip to main content
Unpublished Paper
Distributed Image Search in Camera Sensor Networks
(2008)
  • Tingxin Yan
  • Deepak Ganesan
  • R. Manmatha, University of Massachusetts - Amherst
Abstract

Recent advances in sensor networks permit the use of a large number of relatively inexpensive distributed computational nodes with camera sensors linked in a network and possibly linked to one or more central servers. We argue that the full potential of such a distributed system can be realized if it is designed as a distributed search engine where images from different sensors can be captured, stored, searched and queried. However, unlike traditional image search engines that are focused on resource-rich situations, the resource limitations of camera sensor networks in terms of energy, band- width, computational power, and memory capacity present significant challenges. In this paper, we describe the design and implementation of a distributed search system over a camera sensor network where each node is a search engine that senses, stores and searches information. Our work involves innovation at many levels including local storage, lo- cal search, and distributed search, all of which are designed to be efficient under the resource constraints of sensor net- works. We present an implementation of the search engine on a network of iMote2 sensor nodes equipped with low- power cameras and extended flash storage. We evaluate our system for a dataset comprising book images, and demonstrate more than two orders of magnitude reduction in the amount of data communicated and up to 5x reduction in over- all energy consumption over alternate techniques.

Keywords
  • Distributed Systems,
  • Information Search and Retrieval,
  • camera sensor networks,
  • visterms,
  • vocabulary tree,
  • distributed search
Disciplines
Publication Date
2008
Comments
This is the pre-published version harvested from CIIR.
Citation Information
Tingxin Yan, Deepak Ganesan and R. Manmatha. "Distributed Image Search in Camera Sensor Networks" (2008)
Available at: http://works.bepress.com/r_manmatha/47/