Energy-efficient face detection and recognition scheme for wireless visual sensor networks

Abstract Energy-efficient and robust face detection and recognition scheme can be useful for many application fields such as security and surveillance in multimedia and visual sensor network (VSN). VSN consists of wireless resources-constrained nodes that are equipped with low-energy CMOS cameras for monitoring. On the one hand, captured images are meaningful multimedia-data that impose high energy consumption to be processed and transmitted. On the other hand, visual sensor (VS) is a battery-powered node with limited life-time. This situation leads to a trade-off between detection-accuracy and power-consumption. This trade-off is considered as the most major challenge for applications using multimedia data in wireless environments such as VSN. For optimizing this trade-off, a novel face detection and recognition scheme has been proposed in this paper based on VSN. In this scheme, detection phase is performed at VS and recognition phase is accomplished at the base station (sink). The contributions of this paper are in three folds: 1. Fast and energy-aware face-detection algorithm is proposed based on omitting non-human blobs and feature-based face detection in the considered human-blobs. 2. A novel energy-aware and secure algorithm for extracting light-weight discriminative vector of detected face-sequence to be sent to sink with low transmission-cost and high security level. 3. An efficient face recognition algorithm has been performed on the received vectors at the sink. The performance of our proposed scheme has been evaluated in terms of energy-consumption, detection and recognition accuracy. Experimental results, performed on standard datasets (FERET, Yale and CDnet) and on personal datasets, demonstrate the superiority of our scheme over the recent state-of-the-art methods.