sleepyCAM: Power Management Mechanism for Wireless Video-Surveillance Cameras

In this paper, we propose an energy efficient motion detection and power management mechanism, called sleepyCAM, for wireless camera sensor nodes that do not otherwise support low-power modes. In the proposed solution, a low-power sensor node accompanied with a Pyroelectric Infrared (PIR) sensor and a relay is used to detect motion and manage the power usage of a high-power and high-resolution camera sensor node. To validate our work, we used two baseline benchmarks for comparison that are commonly used as motion detection mechanisms on wireless surveillance cameras: (a) hardware based motion detection using a PIR sensor and (b) software based motion detection using video frame comparison. The main contributions of this paper are the prototype implementation of the sleepyCAM, the surveillance application and the comparison of power consumption between the proposed and the baseline methods. The measurement results indicate that the power consumption of a surveillance camera node can be reduced significantly with the proposed mechanism.