6 Aug 2013
CamSim simulator for distributed camera networks released
CamSim, the simulator for distributed smart camera networks, has just been released in its first version. In the last few months, the pre-release of CamSim went through various major refactoring processes.
The key changes as well as benefits of CamSim are:
- Ease of generating test scenarios, with cameras and objects limited only by computer memory.
- Camera behaviour, using an economic and pheromone inspired approach is implemented, as well as several communication policies. These approaches and communication policies are described in Socio-Economic Vision Graph Generation and Handover in Distributed Smart Camera Networks by Lukas Esterle, Peter R. Lewis, Xin Yao and Bernhard Rinner.
- Several bandit solvers are implemented to provide meta-management at the camera level, selecting between communication policies and auction strategies dynamically at runtime. This behaviour is described in Learning to be Different: Heterogeneity and Efficiency in Distributed Smart Camera Networks by Peter R. Lewis, Lukas Esterle, Arjun Chandra, Bernhard Rinner and Xin Yao.
- The motion behaviour of objects can be replaced using reflection mechanism. Besides prior known movements 'straight' and 'waypoints', where 'straight' defines movement in a straight line and random bouncing off the simulation boundary and 'waypoints' defines a movement along a predefined path, another movement behaviour based on Brownian motion has been added to the collection.
- All aspects of camera behaviour, including bandit solvers, communication strategies and pheromone learning can be replaced using reflection mechanisms.
To provide prospective developers with a low entrance level, abstract classes are available for extension. Furthermore, introductory tutorials are available online at the GitHub Repository.
The first release can be downloaded from https://github.com/EPiCS/CamSim/releases/tag/v1.0.