Optimal Deployment of Heterogeneous Visual Sensor Networks for Target Coverage and Feature Aggregation with Lifetime Guarantee

Due to their need to handle a huge size of image data and limited battery power at each node, visual sensor networks (VSNs) suffer from short network lifetime and long network delay. Consequently, how to reduce network traffic is very important in their operation. The deployment of processing nodes for feature extraction is an effective way to reduce it. Deploying multiple types of camera nodes should help do so as well. Therefore, in this work we investigate how to deploy a heterogeneous VSN for target coverage and feature aggregation with lifetime guarantee at the minimum cost. Since this problem is NP-hard, we propose two heuristics, i.e., separate and joint node deployment algorithms, to solve it. A large number of experimental results expose that the latter has higher success rate and can obtain lower network deployment cost than the former at the expense of extra computation.