—Smart cameras allow pre-processing of video data
on the camera instead of sending it to a remote server for
further analysis. Having a network of smart cameras allows
various vision tasks to be processed in a distributed fashion.
While cameras may have different tasks, we concentrate on distributed
tracking in smart camera networks. This application
introduces various highly interesting problems. Firstly, how can
conflicting goals be satisfied such as cameras in the network
try to track objects while also trying to keep communication
overhead low? Secondly, how can cameras in the network selfadapt
in response to the behaviour of objects and changes in
scenarios, to ensure continued efficient performance? Thirdly,
how can cameras organise themselves to improve the overall
network’s performance and efficiency? This paper presents a
simulation environment, called CamSim, allowing distributed
self-adaptation and self-organisation algorithms to be tested,
without setting up a physical smart camera network. The simulation
tool is written in Java and hence allows high portability
between different operating systems. Relaxing various problems
of computer vision and network communication enables
a focus on implementing and testing new self-adaptation and
self-organisation algorithms for cameras to use