Image mining for infomobility

The wide availability of embedded sensor platforms and low-cost camera sensors - together with the developments in wireless communication - make it now possible the conception of pervasive intelligent systems based on vision. Such systems may be understood as distributed and collaborative sensor networks, able to produce, aggregate and process images in order to mine the observed scene and communicate the relevant information found about it. In this paper, we investigate the peculiarities of visual sensor networks with respect to standard vision systems and we identify possible strategies to tackle the image mining problem. We argue that multi-node processing methods may be envisaged to decompose a complex task into a hierarchy of computationally simpler problems to be solved over the nodes of the network. We illustrate these ideas by describing an application of visual sensor network to infomobility.