Energy-aware strategy for collaborative target-detection in wireless multimedia sensor network Abdulaziz Zam 1 & Mohammad Reza Khayyambashi 1 & Ali Bohlooli 1 Received: 9 May 2018 /Revised: 7 January 2019 /Accepted: 10 January 2019 # Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2019 Abstract Energy-efficiency in visual surveillance is the most important issue for wireless multimedia sensor network (WMSN) due to its energy-constraints. This paper addresses the trade-off between detection-accuracy and power-consumption by presenting an energy-aware scheme for detecting moving target based on clustered WMSN. The contributions of this paper are as follows; 1- An adaptive clustering and nodes activation approach is proposed based on residual energy of detecting nodes and the location of the object at the camera’ s field of view (FoV). 2- An effective cooperative features-pyramid construction method for collaborative target iden- tification with low communication cost. 3- An in-network collaboration mechanism for cooperative detection of the target is proposed. The performance of this scheme is evaluated using both standard datasets and personal recorded videos in terms of detection-accuracy and power-consumption. Compared with state-of-the-art methods, our proposed strategy greatly reduces energy-consumption and saves more than 65% of the network-energy. Detection- accuracy rate of our strategy is 11% better than other recent works. We have increased the Precision of classification up to 49% and 65% and the Recall of classification up to 53% and 71% for specific-target and object-type respectively. These results demonstrate the superiority of our scheme over the recent state-of-the-art works. Keywords Energy efficiency . Multi-scales pyramid construction . Target tracking-by-detection . Wireless multimedia sensor network 1 Introduction In wired multi-camera network, rich-resources of power, bandwidth, memory and processing- capabilities can be employed and then, target detection performance in this network has been so evolved due to the last decade [6, 30, 33]. Due to the fast development of wireless sensor Multimedia Tools and Applications https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-019-7204-5 * Ali Bohlooli bohlooli@eng.ui.ac.ir 1 Faculty of Computer Engineering, University of Isfahan, Isfahan, Iran