Intelligent video surveillance (IVS) systems are based on the recent development of so called embedded smart cameras. Delivering a good service quality in IVS usually results in a higher level of computing activity and therefore in increased power consumption.This work presents PoQoS, a novel approach that aims in maximizing the service quality (i.e., the number of IVSservices and their QoS) while minimizing the system's power consumption. PoQoS enables power-aware reconfiguration of services and hardware resources in distributed logical clusters of embedded smart cameras. In order to find optimal camera configurations during operation, Po-QoS integrates PoSeGA, an online genetic multi-criterion optimization algorithm. A configuration manager properly selects among optimized camera configurations and consequently initializes intra-camera or intra-cluster poweraware reconfiguration with respect to application-and situation-specific context.The evaluation of PoQoS on the PoQoCam, a powerefficient embedded smart camera platform, shows the feasibility of the presented approach.