skip to main content
US FlagAn official website of the United States government
dot gov icon
Official websites use .gov
A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.
https lock icon
Secure .gov websites use HTTPS
A lock ( lock ) or https:// means you've safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.


Title: Video analytics from edge to server: work-in-progress
Deep learning algorithms are an essential component of video analytics systems, in which the content of a video stream is analyzed. Although numerous studies target optimizing server-based video analysis, partially processing videos on edge devices is beneficial. Since edge devices are closer to data, they deliver initial insights on data before sending it to cloud. In this paper, we present an edge-tailored video analytics system by using a multi-stage network designed to run on heterogeneous computing resources.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
1815047
PAR ID:
10195727
Author(s) / Creator(s):
Date Published:
Journal Name:
CODES/ISSS '19: Proceedings of the International Conference on Hardware/Software Codesign and System Synthesis Companion
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
More Like this
  1. Real-time video analytics typically require video frames to be processed by a query to identify objects or activities of interest while adhering to an end-to-end frame processing latency constraint. This imposes a continuous and heavy load on backend compute and network infrastructure. Video data has inherent redundancy and does not always contain an object of interest for a given query. We leverage this property of video streams to propose a lightweight Load Shedder that can be deployed on edge servers or on inexpensive edge devices co-located with cameras. The proposed Load Shedder uses pixel-level color-based features to calculate a utility score for each ingress video frame and a minimum utility threshold to select interesting frames to send for query processing. Dropping unnecessary frames enables the video analytics query in the backend to meet the end-to-end latency constraint with fewer compute and network resources. To guarantee a bounded end-to-end latency at runtime, we introduce a control loop that monitors the backend load and dynamically adjusts the utility threshold. Performance evaluations show that the proposed Load Shedder selects a large portion of frames containing each object of interest while meeting the end-to-end frame processing latency constraint. Furthermore, it does not impose a significant latency overhead when running on edge devices with modest compute resources. 
    more » « less
  2. Recent advances in computer vision algorithms and video streaming technologies have facilitated the development of edge-server-based video analytics systems, enabling them to process sophisticated real-world tasks, such as traffic surveillance and workspace monitoring. Meanwhile, due to their omnidirectional recording capability, 360-degree cameras have been proposed to replace traditional cameras in video analytics systems to offer enhanced situational awareness. Yet, we found that providing an efficient 360-degree video analytics framework is a non-trivial task. Due to the higher resolution and geometric distortion in 360-degree videos, existing video analytics pipelines fail to meet the performance requirements for end-to-end latency and query accuracy. To address these challenges, we introduce the innovative ST-360 framework specifically designed for 360-degree video analytics. This framework features a spatial-temporal filtering algorithm that optimizes both data transmission and computational workloads. Evaluation of the ST-360 framework on a unique dataset of 360-degree first-responders videos reveals that it yields accurate query results with a 50% reduction in end-to-end latency compared to state-of-the-art methods. 
    more » « less
  3. Recent advances in Visual Language Models (VLMs) have significantly enhanced video analytics. VLMs capture complex visual and textual connections. While Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) excel in spatial pattern recognition, VLMs provide a global context, making them ideal for tasks like complex incidents and anomaly detection. However, VLMs are much more computationally intensive, posing challenges for large-scale and real-time applications. This paper introduces EdgeCloudAI, a scalable system integrating VLMs and CNNs through edge-cloud computing. Edge- CloudAI performs initial video processing (e.g., CNN) on edge devices and offloads deeper analysis (e.g., VLM) to the cloud, optimizing resource use and reducing latency. We have deployed EdgeCloudAI on the NSF COSMOS testbed in NYC. In this demo, we will demonstrate EdgeCloudAI’s performance in detecting user-defined incidents in real-time. 
    more » « less
  4. Edge-assisted video analytics is gaining momentum. In this work, we tackle an important problem to compress video content live streamed from the device to the edge without scarifying accuracy and timeliness of its video analytics. We find that on-device processing can be tuned over a larger configuration space for more video compression, which was largely overlooked. Inspired by our pilot study, we design VPPlus to fulfill the potentials to compress the video as much as we can, while preserving analytical accuracy. VPPlus incorporates two core modules – offline profiling and online adaptation – to generate proper feedback automatically and quickly to tune on-device processing. We validate the effectiveness and efficiency of VPPlususing five object detection tasks over two popular datasets; VPPlus outperforms the state-of-art approaches in almost all the cases. 
    more » « less
  5. Vehicle tracking, a core application to smart city video analytics, is becoming more widely deployed than ever before thanks to the increasing number of traffic cameras and recent advances in computer vision and machine-learning. Due to the constraints of bandwidth, latency, and privacy concerns, tracking tasks are more preferable to run on edge devices sitting close to the cameras. However, edge devices are provisioned with a fixed amount of computing budget, making them incompetent to adapt to time-varying and imbalanced tracking workloads caused by traffic dynamics. In coping with this challenge, we propose WatchDog, a real-time vehicle tracking system that fully utilizes edge nodes across the road network. WatchDog leverages computer vision tasks with different resource-accuracy tradeoffs, and decomposes and schedules tracking tasks judiciously across edge devices based on the current workload to maximize the number of tasks while ensuring a provable response time-bound at each edge device. Extensive evaluations have been conducted using real-world city-wide vehicle trajectory datasets, achieving exceptional tracking performance with a real-time guarantee. 
    more » « less