JOURNAL OF INFORMATION SCIENCE AND ENGINEERING 23, 1955-1969 (2007) 1955 Short Paper_________________________________________________ An Intelligent Sensor Network for Object Detection, Classification and Recognition FRANK Y. SHIH, YI-TA WU, CHAO-FA CHUANG, JIANN-LIANG CHEN 1 , HSI-FENG LU 1 AND YAO-CHUNG CHANG 2 Computer Vision Laboratory, College of Computing Sciences New Jersey Institute of Technology Newark, New Jersey 07102, U.S.A. 1 Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering National Dong Hwa University Hualien, 974 Taiwan 2 Department of Information Management National Taitung University Taitung, 684 Taiwan In this paper, an intelligent sensor network is developed for object detection, classi- fication and recognition. We utilize wireless sensors as the first layer to detect coordi- nates of moving objects in a secured area. Cameras are activated to capture image fea- tures for object classification and recognition. In order to reduce processing time, a hier- archical image extraction approach is developed. Global object features such as size and motion are acquired for classifying objects into a number of classes. If the moving object is considered suspicious, the cameras will be requested to capture detailed images for object recognition. Experimental results show that our system can achieve a high face recognition rate of 95.4% for the testing images captured by the surveillance system. Keywords: surveillance system, sensor networks, support vector machine, pattern recog- nition 1. INTRODUCTION A surveillance system or a closed-circuit television system is used to maintain a close observation of a person or a group [1]. It has been widely adopted nowadays to help a guard with consecutive sensing information. Unfortunately, the concurrent obser- vations of several monitors and the long-term exhausting visualization have caused the major defect of decaying attention. Consequently, the need for developing an efficient, automated surveillance system is critical to ensure robust security. Researchers have paid attentions on combining surveillance systems with wireless sensor networks (WSNs) in various applications. Wireless sensor network [2, 3] is an emerging field that generates a broad range of applications including environment moni- Received November 11, 2005; revised March 24, July 7 & August 30, 2006; accepted September 27, 2006. Communicated by Pau-Choo Chung.