Sensor network reconfiguration and big multimedia data fusion for situational awareness in smart environments

INTRODUCTION In the last years, an increasing number of environments have been enhanced with smart sensors and have become more and more smart and self-organizing [1]. Situational awareness (SA) in these wide areas covers a huge range of topics and challenges [2]. As matter of fact, understanding activities for situation assessment cannot be achieved locally but it requires to widen as much as possible the monitored area. Several different and new problems must be investigated from the use of single sensors able to adapt internal or external parameters to the cooperation of multiple sensors in a dynamic and smart network [3] that continuously adapt to the scenario evolution by changing topology, controlling sensors parameters, switchingon/off nodes, deciding the best spectrum for specific analysis, etc. In this contribution, an innovative situational aware system for smart environments is presented. It is based on an original architecture that allows two-way communications and combines content produced by citizens living in the environment with data generated from distributed sensor networks. The main functionalities of the proposed architecture are: (a) to collect geo-referenced multimedia data from multiple sensors, e.g., infrastructure sensors (video cameras, microphones, etc.) or from citizens (e.g., mobile smartphone, social applications such as Twitter or Facebook, etc.); (b) to process and fuse locally rough data acquired by infrastructure sensors; (c) to reconfigure the sensor network according with the locally process data, (d) to communicate data about detected events via a high-speed wireless communication network to the unified operative center; (e) to integrate different multimedia data to obtain a robust situational awareness of the observed environment; (f) to collect on demand additional data (e.g. short video and audio sequences) using unmanned autonomous vehicles (UAVs); (g) to share targeted information amongst different executive monitoring units; (h) to guarantee the system security and at the same time to ensure timely and reliable access to useful information.