Perpetual Wireless Video Camera for Internet-of-Things

Digital sensing, processing, and communication capabilities will be ubiquitously embedded into everyday objects, turning them into an Internet of things (IoT). This is the next-generation Internet – rather than data mainly produced by humans and for humans, in the new machine-to-machine-era Internet, data are generated by machines (sensors), communicated without human involvement to other machines (servers or other computer systems) for automated processing to enable automated or human actions, driving speeds and scales unseen by the existing Internet. Distributed video cameras will play important roles in various IoT applications. To resolve the problems of high data rate, high power consumption, and large deployment cost of large-scale distributed video sensors, perpetual video cameras, where net energy consumption is almost zero, are required. Many technologies and design challenges are introduced for designing such cameras, such as energy harvesting, distributed video coding, distributed video analysis, and the associated VLSI designs. In this seminar, we will provide (1) an overview of challenges/opportunities in IoT, (2) an introduction to the rote and requirements of distributed smart cameras in IoT, (3) the analysis of power consumption of wireless video cameras, (4) an introduction of energy harvesting techniques, and (5) distributed video coding and distributed video analysis, where both the state-of-the-art works and possible future research directions will be shown.