Abstract—Object detection quality and network lifetime are two conflicting aspects of a sensor network, but both are critical to many sensor applications such as military surveillance. Partial coverage, where a sensing field is partially sensed by active sensors at any time, is an appropriate approach to balancing the two conflicting design requirements of monitoring applications. Under partial coverage, we develop an analytical framework for object detection in sensor networks, and mathematically analyze average-case object detection quality in random and synchronized sensing scheduling protocols. Our analytical framework facilitates performance evaluation of a sensing schedule, network deployment, and sensing scheduling protocol design. Furthermore, we propose three wave sensing scheduling protocols to achieve bounded worst-case object detection quality. We justify the correctness of our analyses through rigorous proof, and validate the effectiveness of the proposed protocols through extensive simulation experiments.