Low-Power Operation for Video Event Data Recorder

Due to limited battery capacity, reducing power consumption of mobile surveillance camera like a video event data recorder is important to extend surveillance time. In this chapter, we propose a design of low-power video event data recorder which records events such as movement of objects, or impact to the camera itself. Duty-cycling of two different encoders, which are a low-power encoder and a high-compression encoder, are employed to implement the low-power video event data recorder. Operating time of the proposed system is considerably extended by duty-cycling of the two encoders in the event-driven operation; the system mainly stays in event detection mode and wakes up only when an event is detected. Because the most valuable information in the event is right before or at the moment of event detection, the proposed system records video from 10 s before the event detection. According to experiment, the energy consumption of the proposed system is decreased up to 25.1 % (by 33.2 % on average) of conventional video event data recorder. As energy consumption of the proposed system is reduced by 66.8 % on average, the surveillance time of the proposed system can be increased by three times consequentially.