Abstract
More recently, the rapid improvements and availability of inexpensive hardware such as CMOS cameras and microphones that are able to ubiquitously capture multimedia content from the environment have fostered the development of multimedia sensor networks (MSNs). MSN covers many aspects such as algorithms, protocols, architectures, and hardware as well and has the great potential to enable a large number of applications, which thus have drawn wide attention of the research community.
This special issue contains five papers. The papers selected for the special issue only represent some new research results in this domain.
In the paper, “Secure data aggregation in wireless multimedia sensor networks based on similarity matching,” R. Gao et al. propose a scheme to improve the energy efficiency for multimedia data. The proposed scheme divides multimedia data into multiple different pieces and transmits the effective pieces to the selected sensor nodes, which can achieve substantially superior performances over conventional methods in terms of energy efficiency and data transmission under the resource-constrained wireless multimedia sensor networks.
In the paper, “Power-aware data transmission for real-time communication in multimedia sensor networks,” S. Rhee et al. present a power-aware data transmission scheme for real-time communication in MSNs which can not only provide real-time performance, but also conserve energy consumption through efficient transmission and without periodic message exchange.
In the paper, “Quality analysis of massive high-definition video streaming in two-tiered embedded camera-sensing systems,” J. Kim and E.-S. Ryu present the quality analysis results of high-definition video streaming in two-tiered camera sensor network applications. The capacity degradation due to the interference impacts from the camera-sensing nodes to the main aggregation link (AL), that is, the link from AL transmitter to AL receiver, is first analyzed and then the quality analysis results are presented in terms of the number of cameras in a cell, beamwidth, the transmit power at camera sensor nodes, and the transmit power at AL nodes. Performance evaluation with actual video streams is finally presented.
In the paper, “Using traffic light signal to enhance intersection foreground detection based on video sensor networks,” R. Ding et al. integrate traffic light signal obtained from sensor networks to improve the results of foreground detection, which enables background subtraction method to adapt itself with the outside world changes instantly. Thus, the detection accuracy can be improved.
In the paper, “Distributed intelligent assistance robotic system with sensor networks based on robot technology middleware,” S. Jia et al. propose a distributed intelligent assistant robotic system to improve the quality of the elderly people's lives in the population aging society. SP2ATM with RBPF is used for path planning and localization of mobile robots. And an accurate and reliable 3D environment map is reconstructed by using an effective 3D digitalization technique from multiview stereo. The system can provide user human tracking services based on multifeature mean shift under the double-layer locating mechanism and a distributed control technology RTM (robot technology middleware) is developed to improve the feasibility and reliability of the system. The experimental results verify effectiveness of the system.
Footnotes
Acknowledgments
We will thank the authors for sharing their excellent work with the readers. And the careful and hard work of all the reviewers on these papers is also greatly appreciated.