Distributed Mobile Computer Vision: Advances, Challenges and Applications

The role of mobile devices has shifted from purely passively transmitting text messages and voice calls to proactively providing any kind of information that is also accessible to a PC. The recent advances in the field of micro technology have also made possible to include a camera sensor in any mobile device. This innovation is now attracting both the research community and the industries that aim to develop mobile applications that exploit recent computer vision algorithms. In this chapter we provide an analysis of the recent advances of mobile computer vision, then we discuss the current challenges that the community is currently dealing with. Next, an analysis of two recent case studies where mobile vision is used for augmented reality and surveillance applications is discussed. Finally, we introduce the next challenges in mobile vision where the mobile devices are part of a visual sensor network. © 2014 Springer Science+Business Media New York. All rights are reserved.