SmartPhoto: A Resource-Aware Crowdsourcing Approach for Image Sensing with Smartphones

Yibo Wu, Yi Wang, Wenjie Hu, Guohong Cao

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

51 Scopus citations

Abstract

Photos obtained via crowdsourcing can be used in many critical applications. Due to the limitations of communication bandwidth, storage, and processing capability, it is a challenge to transfer the huge amount of crowdsourced photos. To address this problem, we propose a framework, called SmartPhoto, to quantify the quality (utility) of crowdsourced photos based on the accessible geographical and geometrical information (called metadata ) including the smartphone's orientation, position, and all related parameters of the built-in camera. From the metadata, we can infer where and how the photo is taken, and then only transmit the most useful photos. Four optimization problems regarding the tradeoffs between photo utility and resource constraints, namely Max-Utility, online Max-Utility, Min-Selection, and Min-Selection with k -coverage, are studied. Efficient algorithms are proposed and their performance bounds are theoretically proved. We have implemented SmartPhoto in a testbed using Android based smartphones, and proposed techniques to improve the accuracy of the collected metadata by reducing sensor reading errors and solving object occlusion issues. Results based on real implementations and extensive simulations demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Article number7126979
Pages (from-to)1249-1263
Number of pages15
JournalIEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing
Volume15
Issue number5
DOIs
StatePublished - May 1 2016

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • Software
  • Computer Networks and Communications
  • Electrical and Electronic Engineering

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