Performance evaluation of background subtraction algorithms for Android devices deployed in Wireless Multimedia Sensor Networks

With the increased use of smart phones, Wireless Multimedia Sensor Networks (WMSNs) will have opportunities to deploy such devices in several contexts for data collection and processing. While smart phones come with richer resources and can do complex processing, their battery is still limited. Therefore, data reduction techniques can be used on these devices to reduce energy consumption. One of the common techniques for energy reduction is background subtraction, which has been used for camera sensors in WMSNs. In this paper, we investigate the performance of various BS algorithms on Android devices in terms of computation and communication energy, time and quality. To this end, we picked five different BS algorithms and implemented them in an Android platform. Considering the fact that these BS algorithms will be run within the context of WMSNs where the data is subject to packet losses and errors, we also investigated the performance in terms of packet loss ratio in the network under various packet sizes. The experiment results indicated that the most energy-efficient BS algorithm could also provide the best quality in terms of the foreground detected. The results also indicate that BS algorithms can provide significant energy savings in terms of transmission energy costs.