Battery-Free Connected Machine Vision with WISPCam

Abstract

Sustained exponential improvements in the energy efficiency of microelectronics has recently enabled us to build battery-free camera systems that are powered entirely by propagating radio waves. This paper describes primitive machine vision applications built using this highly constrained, battery-free camera system. After describing the WISPCam system and its constraints, we show how to use it to capture (relatively) high-resolution images of faces, without ever capturing a full frame at high resolution. This example application illustrates the issues that arise in partitioning a demanding vision application across mobile hardware that is highly constrained in power, storage, computation and communication.