The use of sensing devices to perform monitoring tasks has continuously evolved in the past decades. The initial application scope has been enlarged and connected sensors have become common in many monitoring scenarios. In this process, new communication standards and hardware platforms have been developed to support sensor-based applications, bringing the distributed sensing paradigm to its current spotlight. The maturation of the sensor networks has happened following different but sometimes concurrent paths, associating different areas of Computer Science and Engineering. One of such paths has exploited camera-based sensors to retrieve visual data, opening new and exciting perspectives for this area. The resulting Visual Sensor Networks have been an important research topic due to the large complexities associated to the capturing, processing, transmission, and storage of images and videos, as well as the wide applicability of such visual data for different monitoring and control functions. There are many challenges when employing visual sensor networks. The large amount of data produced by visual sensors will inevitably raise energy and bandwidth concerns, which may severely impact the entire network operation. Moreover, many applications may have real-time delivery demands, which may be hard to accomplish in ad hoc sensor networks. Finally, security issues as confidentiality and authenticity put additional processing burden on some sensors, which will be already striving to handle visual data. All these complex scenarios have fostered research works to optimize and enhance visual sensor networks. Besides addressing the challenging issues related to the visual sensors operation cycle, research works have been concerned with the adoption of cameras as sensing units, improving traditional sensor-based applications and even fostering the development of new ones. Actually, the evolving Internet of Things landscape has taken visual sensor nodes as an important source of information, directly benefiting applications in traffic control, public security, industry 4.0, vehicular networks, and smart agriculture, among many others. For the coming years, new possibilities for visual sensing are still expected. This Special Issue presents innovative research papers addressing classical and new challenges of visual sensor networks and related applications. A total of eight papers were submitted for it, but only five papers were accepted for publication. The published papers bring relevant contributions to the area, being an important reference for new works. In this sense, we would like to thank all authors who have submitted their manuscripts to this Special Issue and also the reviewers for their hard work during the review process.

Visual Sensor Networks and Related Applications

Collotta, Mario
2019-01-01

Abstract

The use of sensing devices to perform monitoring tasks has continuously evolved in the past decades. The initial application scope has been enlarged and connected sensors have become common in many monitoring scenarios. In this process, new communication standards and hardware platforms have been developed to support sensor-based applications, bringing the distributed sensing paradigm to its current spotlight. The maturation of the sensor networks has happened following different but sometimes concurrent paths, associating different areas of Computer Science and Engineering. One of such paths has exploited camera-based sensors to retrieve visual data, opening new and exciting perspectives for this area. The resulting Visual Sensor Networks have been an important research topic due to the large complexities associated to the capturing, processing, transmission, and storage of images and videos, as well as the wide applicability of such visual data for different monitoring and control functions. There are many challenges when employing visual sensor networks. The large amount of data produced by visual sensors will inevitably raise energy and bandwidth concerns, which may severely impact the entire network operation. Moreover, many applications may have real-time delivery demands, which may be hard to accomplish in ad hoc sensor networks. Finally, security issues as confidentiality and authenticity put additional processing burden on some sensors, which will be already striving to handle visual data. All these complex scenarios have fostered research works to optimize and enhance visual sensor networks. Besides addressing the challenging issues related to the visual sensors operation cycle, research works have been concerned with the adoption of cameras as sensing units, improving traditional sensor-based applications and even fostering the development of new ones. Actually, the evolving Internet of Things landscape has taken visual sensor nodes as an important source of information, directly benefiting applications in traffic control, public security, industry 4.0, vehicular networks, and smart agriculture, among many others. For the coming years, new possibilities for visual sensing are still expected. This Special Issue presents innovative research papers addressing classical and new challenges of visual sensor networks and related applications. A total of eight papers were submitted for it, but only five papers were accepted for publication. The published papers bring relevant contributions to the area, being an important reference for new works. In this sense, we would like to thank all authors who have submitted their manuscripts to this Special Issue and also the reviewers for their hard work during the review process.
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Utilizza questo identificativo per citare o creare un link a questo documento: https://hdl.handle.net/11387/142766
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