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Many sensor network applications, such as object tracking and disaster monitoring, require effective techniques for event detection. In this paper, we propose a novel event detection mechanism based on matching the contour maps of in-network sensory data distribution. Our key observation is that events in sensor networks can be abstracted into spatio-temporal patterns of sensory data and that pattern matching can be done efficiently through contour map matching. Therefore, we propose simple SQL extensions to allow users to specify common types of events as patterns in contour maps and study energy-efficient techniques of contour map construction and maintenance for our pattern-based event detection. Our experiments with synthetic workloads derived from a real-world coal mine surveillance application validate the effectiveness and efficiency of our approach.