Camera Integration to Wireless Sensor Node

Abstract

A wireless sensor node with a vision sensing and image processing capabilities has a great utilisation potential in many industrial, healthcare and military applications. University of Vaasa has recently been developing a wireless sensor node called UWASA Node. It is a generic, modular and stackable wireless sensor platform. This work aims to integrate a camera module to UWASA Node and focuses on hardware design, software development, and easy image processing methods. Since the design is intended to prove the feasibility of the image processing in UWASA Node, a test board has been developed and integrated to a development kit which reflects the same behaviour as the sensor node platform. The new hardware and software has been designed and tested to verify vision sensor adaptation, image processing, and feature extraction in wireless sensor nodes. Due to the resource limited nature of the wireless sensor nodes, some new methods are introduced to achieve fast and efficient image processing. In summary, the hardware structure of the camera module and its working principles are designed explained, data handling and image processing methods are discussed, finally the achieved results are presented.