Detecting change in snapshot sequences

Abstract

Wireless sensor networks are deployed to monitor dynamic geographic phenomena, or objects, over space and time. This paper presents a new spatiotemporal data model for dynamic areal objects in sensor networks. Our model supports for the first time the analysis of change in sequences of snapshots that are captured by different granularity of observations, and our model allows both incremental and non-incremental changes. This paper focuses on detecting qualitative spatial changes, such as merge and split of areal objects. A decentralized algorithm is developed, such that spatial changes can be efficiently detected by in-network aggregation of decentralized datasets. © 2010 Springer-Verlag.