Today's common computing hardware--Internet connected PCs and inexpensive, commodity off-the-shelf sensors such as Webcams--is an ideal platform for a worldwide sensor web. The Internet-scale Resource-Intensive Sensor Network Services (IrisNet) project is developing a scalable software infrastructure for this platform that lets users query globally distributed collections of high-bit-rate sensors powerfully and efficiently.
IrisNet facilitates the deployment of webcam services that leverage both real-time and historical video feeds from any number of webcams, from other data sources, and from other types of sensor data. Each sensor is locally attached to a computer that is capable of resource-intensive processing such as image recognition.
Please visit the IrisNet Website* for further details.