Energy Efficient Intrusion Detection in Camera Sensor Networks

The problem we address in this paper is how to detect an intruder moving through a polygonal space that is equipped with a camera sensor network. We propose a probabilistic sensor tasking algorithm in which cameras sense the environment independently of one another, thus reducing the communication overhead. Since constant monitoring is prohibitively expensive with complex sensors such as cameras, the amount of sensing done is also minimized. To be effective, a minimum detection probability must be guaranteed by the system over all possible paths through the space. The straightforward approach of enumerating all such paths is intractable, since there is generally an infinite number of potential paths. Using a geometric decomposition of the space, we lowerbound the detection probability over all paths using a small number of linear constraints. The camera tasking is computed for set of example layouts and shows large performance gains with our probabilistic scheme over both constant monitoring as well as over a deterministic heuristic.