Cost-Aware Coalitions for Collaborative Tracking in Resource-Constrained Camera Networks

Abstract

Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works. J. C. SanMiguel and A. Cavallaro, "Cost-Aware Coalitions for Collaborative Tracking in Resource-Constrained Camera Networks," in IEEE Sensors Journal, vol. 15, no. 5, pp. 2657-2668, May 2015. doi: 10.1109/JSEN.2014.2367015We propose an approach to create camera coalitions in resource-constrained camera networks and demonstrate it for collaborative target tracking. We cast coalition formation as a decentralized resource allocation process where the best cameras among those viewing a target are assigned to a coalition based on marginal utility theory. A manager is dynamically selected to negotiate with cameras whether they will join the coalition and to coordinate the tracking task. This negotiation is based not only on the utility brought by each camera to the coalition, but also on the associated cost (i.e. additional processing and communication). Experimental results and comparisons using simulations and real data show that the proposed approach outperforms related state-of-the-art methods by improving tracking accuracy in cost-free settings. Moreover, under resource limitations, the proposed approach controls the tradeoff between accuracy and cost, and achieves energy savings with only a minor reduction in accuracy.This work was supported in part by the EU Crowded Environments monitoring for Activity Understanding and Recognition (CEN-TAUR, FP7-PEOPLE-2012-IAPP) Project under GA number 324359, and in part by the Artemis JU and U.K. Technology Strategy Board as part of the Cognitive and Perceptive Cameras (COPCAMS) Project under GA number 332913