CamTest: A laboratory testbed for camera-based mobile sensing applications

Abstract Testing camera-based sensing applications on mobile devices is challenging and time-consuming. In this paper, we present CamTest, a novel laboratory testbed for camera-based mobile sensing applications. It enables researchers to conduct systematic, affordable and efficient tests on their applications in laboratory conditions. Instead of real-world tests that directly use the camera, CamTest delivers the frames of a video clip to the image processing module of the targeted application. Meanwhile, CamTest tracks the image processing output, errors and image processing speed of the targeted application at runtime. After testing, CamTest can visualise the recorded information simultaneously with video playback so that testers can understand how the sensing context affects the behaviours of the application. Through computational efficiency measurements, and a user study with 14 developers, we show that CamTest can effectively facilitate and simplify the testing of camera-based mobile sensing applications.