A Study on the Impact of Multiview Distributed Feature Coding on a Multicamera Vehicle Tracking System at Roundabouts

Visual sensor networks are one potential enabler for the evolution of the Internet of things. Due to their limited resources in terms of energy and bandwidth, it is crucial to identify appropriate approaches that take into considerations such constraints and reduce the amount of data transmitted to the gathering point (sink). In this context, this paper describes the impact of a distributed smart-camera system that exploits an analyze-then-compress strategy, on a multi-view vehicle tracking at roundabouts application. In the tested system, part of the processing is shifted to the smart cameras, i.e., the object detection/classification and feature extraction, so that only the extracted features describing moving vehicles are transmitted instead of the whole image/video. Features are further compacted by using a state-of-the-art distributed coding technique, based upon an efficient clustering method that exploits the temporal and spatial (multiple views) correlations between features. T...