Wireless Multimedia Sensor Networks and Data Fusion: An Overview

In the era of big data, Wireless Multimedia Sensor Networks (WMSNs) have emerged as an enabling and effective technology for multimedia data sensing in physical environment. Wireless communication being resource constrained finds it difficult to support the volume and the type of big data traffic for acquisition and distribution. It poses complex technical challenges particularly in terms of computational power, transmission bandwidth, and energy consumption. In this paper, we have presented an account of important features and requirements of WMSNs for monitoring and analyzing the data recorded through multimodal sensors. Recent fusion strategies including those based on artificial intelligence for achieving improved accuracy in extracting the intelligence from big data are analyzed. Their limitations are identified and probable solutions in context with the real-field deployment of the emerging ubiquitous computing systems are outlined.