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: Do Larger (More Accurate) Deep Neural Network Models Help in Edge-assisted Augmented Reality?
Edge-assisted Augmented Reality (AR) which offloads computeintensive Deep Neural Network (DNN)-based AR tasks to edge servers faces an important design challenge: how to pick the DNN model out of many choices proposed for each AR task for offloading. For each AR task, e.g., depth estimation, many DNN-based models have been proposed over time that vary in accuracy and complexity. In general, more accurate models are also more complex; they are larger and have longer inference time. Thus choosing a larger model in offloading can provide higher accuracy for the offloaded frames but also incur longer turnaround time, during which the AR app has to reuse the estimation result from the last offloaded frame, which can lead to lower average accuracy. In this paper, we experimentally study this design tradeoff using depth estimation as a case study. We design optimal offloading schedule and further consider the impact of numerous factors such as on-device fast tracking, frame downsizing and available network bandwidth. Our results show that for edge-assisted monocular depth estimation, with proper frame downsizing and fast tracking, compared to small models, the improved accuracy of large models can offset its longer turnaround time to provide higher average estimation accuracy across frames under both LTE and 5G mmWave.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
2112778
PAR ID:
10342975
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ; ;
Date Published:
Journal Name:
NAI'21: Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM 2021 Workshop on Network-Application Integration
Page Range / eLocation ID:
47 to 52
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
More Like this
  1. Edge-assisted AR supports high-quality AR on resource-constrained mobile devices by offloading high-rate camera-captured frames to powerful GPU edge servers to perform heavy vision tasks. Since the result of an offloaded frame may not come back in the same frame interval, edge-assisted AR designs resort to local tracking on the last server returned result to generate more accurate result for the current frame. In such an offloading+local tracking paradigm, reducing the staleness of the last server returned result is critical to improving AR task accuracy. In this paper, we present MPCP, an online offloading scheduling framework that minimizes the staleness of server-returned result in edge-assisted AR by optimally pipelining network transfer of frames to the edge server and the Deep Neural Network inference on the edge server. MPCP is based on model predictive control (MPC). Our evaluation results show that MPCP reduces the depth estimation error by up to 10.0% compared to several baseline schemes. 
    more » « less
  2. Immersive applications such as Augmented Reality (AR) and Mixed Reality (MR) often need to perform multiple latency-critical tasks on every frame captured by the camera, which all require results to be available within the current frame interval. While such tasks are increasingly supported by Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) offloaded to edge servers due to their high accuracy but heavy computation, prior work has largely focused on offloading one task at a time. Compared to offloading a single task, where more frequent offloading directly translates into higher task accuracy, offloading of multiple tasks competes for shared edge server resources, and hence faces the additional challenge of balancing the offloading frequencies of different tasks to maximize the overall accuracy and hence app QoE. In this paper, we formulate this accuracy-centric multitask offloading problem, and present a framework that dynamically schedules the offloading of multiple DNN tasks from a mobile device to an edge server while optimizing the overall accuracy across tasks. Our design employs two novel ideas: (1) task-specific lightweight models that predict offloading accuracy drop as a function of offloading frequency and frame content, and (2) a general two-level control feedback loop that concurrently balances offloading among tasks and adapts between offloading and using local algorithms for each task. Evaluation results show that our framework improves the overall accuracy significantly in jointly offloading two core tasks in AR — depth estimation and odometry — by on average 7.6%–14.3% over the best baselines under different accuracy weight ratios. 
    more » « less
  3. With faster wireless networks and server GPUs, offloading high-accuracy but compute-intensive AR tasks implemented in Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) to edge servers offers a promising way to support high-QoE Augmented/Mixed Reality (AR/MR) applications. A cost-effective way for AR app vendors to deploy such edge-assisted AR apps to support a large user base is to use commercial Machine-Learning-as-a-Service (MLaaS) deployed at the edge cloud. To maximize cost-effectiveness, such an MLaaS provider faces a key design challenge, \ie how to maximize the number of clients concurrently served by each GPU server in its cluster while meeting per-client AR task accuracy SLAs. The above AR offloading inference serving problem differs from generic inference serving or video analytics serving in one fundamental way: due to the use of local tracking which reuses the last server-returned inference result to derive results for the current frame, the offloading frequency and end-to-end latency of each AR client directly affect its AR task accuracy (for all the frames). In this paper, we present ARISE, a framework that optimizes the edge server capacity in serving edge-assisted AR clients. Our design exploits the intricate interplay between per-client offloading schedule and batched inference on the server via proactively coordinating offloading request streams from different AR clients. Our evaluation using a large set of emulated AR clients and a 10-phone testbed shows that \name supports 1.7x--6.9x more clients compared to various baselines while keeping the per-client accuracy within the client-specified accuracy SLAs. 
    more » « less
  4. We revisit the performance of a canonical system design for edge-assisted AR that simply combines off-the-shelf H.264 video encoding with a standard object tracking technique. Our experimental analysis shows that the simple canonical design for edge-assisted object detection can achieve within 3.07%/1.51% of the accuracy of ideal offloading (which assumes infinite network bandwidth and the total network transmission time of a single RTT) under LTE/5G mmWave networks. Our findings suggest that recent trend towards sophisticated system architecture design for edge-assisted AR appears unnecessary. We provide insights for why video compression plus on-device object tracking is so effective in edge-assisted object detection, draw implications to edge-assisted AR research, and pose open problems that warrant further investigation into this surprise finding. 
    more » « less
  5. Augmented Reality (AR) devices are set apart from other mobile devices by the immersive experience they offer. While the powerful suite of sensors on modern AR devices is necessary for enabling such an immersive experience, they can create unease in bystanders (i.e., those surrounding the device during its use) due to potential bystander data leaks, which is called the bystander privacy problem. In this paper, we propose BystandAR, the first practical system that can effectively protect bystander visual (camera and depth) data in real-time with only on-device processing. BystandAR builds on a key insight that the device user's eye gaze and voice are highly effective indicators for subject/bystander detection in interpersonal interaction, and leverages novel AR capabilities such as eye gaze tracking, wearer-focused microphone, and spatial awareness to achieve a usable frame rate without offloading sensitive information. Through a 16-participant user study,we show that BystandAR correctly identifies and protects 98.14% of bystanders while allowing access to 96.27% of subjects. We accomplish this with average frame rates of 52.6 frames per second without the need to offload unprotected bystander data to another device. 
    more » « less