ABSTRACTCamera sensor networks have recently emerged as a critical research topic. In this paper, we investigate the coverage problem for camera sensor networks. Specially, compared to the coverage problem for target detection which has been intensively studied, this paper studies the coverage problem from the perspective of target localization. We first propose a novel localization‐oriented sensing model based on the perspective projection of the camera sensors. Then, under the random uniform deployment strategy, we analyze how the probability of the localization‐oriented coverage (L‐coverage for short) changes with the sensors number and the parameters of the proposed sensing model. Finally, we conduct extensive simulations to validate our model and theoretical analysis about L‐coverage probability. The obtained results show that our scheme can be effectively applied for practical scenarios. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.