The costs of fusion in smart camera networks

ABSTRACT The choice of the most suitable fusion scheme for smart camera networks depends on the application as well as on the available computational and communication resources. In this paper we discuss and compare the resource requirements of five fusion schemes, namely centralised fusion, flooding, consensus, token passing and dynamic clustering. The Extended Information Filter is applied to each fusion scheme to perform target tracking. Token passing and dynamic clustering involve negotiation among viewing nodes (cameras observing the same target) to decide which node should perform the fusion process whereas flooding and consensus do not include this negotiation. Negotiation helps limiting the number of participating cameras and reduces the required resources for the fusion process itself but requires additional communication. Consensus has the highest communication and computation costs but it is the only scheme that can be applied when not all viewing nodes are connected directly and routing tables are not available