Cameras are the defacto sensor. The growing demand for real-time and low-power computer vision, coupled with trends towards high-efficiency heterogeneous systems, has given rise to a wide range of image processing acceleration techniques at the camera node and in the cloud. In this paper, we characterize two novel camera systems that employ acceleration techniques to push the extremes of energy and performance scaling, and explore the computation-communication tradeoffs in their designs. The first case study is a camera system designed to detect and authenticate individual faces, running solely on energy harvested from RFID readers. We design a multi-accelerator SoC design operating in the sub-mW range, and evaluate it with real-world workloads to show performance and energy efficiency improvements over a general purpose microprocessor. The second camera system is a 16-camera rig processing over 32 Gb s of data to produce real-time 3D-360 degree virtual reality video. We design a multi-FPGA processing pipeline that outperforms CPU and GPU configurations by up to 10 @math in the computation time, producing panoramic stereo video directly from the camera rig at 30 frames per second. We find that an early data reduction step, either before complex processing or offloading, is the most critical optimization for in-camera systems.
 This article discusses the challenges in computer systems research posed by the emerging field of pervasive computing. It first examines the relationship of this new field to its predecessors: distributed systems and mobile computing. It then identifies four new research thrusts: effective use of smart spaces, invisibility, localized scalability, and masking uneven conditioning. Next, it sketches a couple of hypothetical pervasive computing scenarios, and uses them to identify key capabilities missing from today's systems. The article closes with a discussion of the research necessary to develop these capabilities. Much has been said recently on off-loading computations from the phone. In particular, workloads such as speech and visual recognition that involve models based on "big data" are thought to be prime candidates for cloud processing. We posit that the next few years will see the arrival of mobile usages that require continuous processing of audio and video data from wearable devices. We argue that these usages are unlikely to flourish unless substantial computation is moved back on to the phone. We outline possible solutions to the problems inherent in such a move. We advocate a close partnership between perception and systems researchers to realize these usages.