Analysis of distributed fusion alternatives in coordinated vision agents

Abstract

In this paper, we detail some technical alternatives when building a coherent distributed visual sensor network by using the multi-agent paradigm. We argue that the multi-agent paradigm fits well within the visual sensor network architecture and in this paper we specially focus on the problem of distributed data fusion. Three different data fusion coordination schemes are proposed and experimental results of passive fusion are presented and discussed. The main contributions of this paper are twofold, first we propose the use of multi-agent paradigm as the visual sensor architecture and present a real system results. Secondly, the use of feedback information in the visual sensors, called active fusion, is proposed. The experimental results prove that the multi-agent paradigm fits well within the visual sensor network and provide a novel mechanism to develop a real visual sensor network system.