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Cameras are deployed at scale with the purpose of searching and tracking objects of interest (e.g., a suspected person) through the camera network on live videos. Such cross-camera analytics is data and compute intensive, whose costs grow with the number of cameras and time. We present Spatula, a cost-efficient system that enables scaling cross-camera analytics on edge compute boxes to large camera networks by leveraging the spatial and temporal cross-camera correlations. While such correlations have been used in computer vision community, Spatula uses them to drastically reduce the communication and computation costs by pruning search space of a query identity (e.g., ignoring frames not correlated with the query identity’s current position). Spatula provides the first system substrate on which cross-camera analytics applications can be built to efficiently harness the cross-camera correlations that are abundant in large camera deployments. Spatula reduces compute load by $8.3\times$ on an 8-camera dataset, and by $23\times-86\times$ on two datasets with hundreds of cameras (simulated from real vehicle/pedestrian traces). We have also implemented Spatula on a testbed of 5 AWS DeepLens cameras. 

Large volumes of videos are continuously recorded from cameras deployed for traffic control and surveillance with the goal of answering “after the fact” queries: identify video frames with objects of certain classes (cars, bags) from many days of recorded video. Current systems for processing such queries on large video datasets incur either high cost at video ingest time or high latency at query time. We present Focus, a system providing both low-cost and low-latency querying on large video datasets. Focus’s architecture flexibly and effectively divides the query processing work between ingest time and query time. At ingest time (on live videos), Focus uses cheap convolutional network classifiers (CNNs) to construct an approximate index of all possible object classes in each frame (to handle queries for any class in the future). At query time, Focus leverages this approximate index to provide low latency, but compensates for the lower accuracy of the cheap CNNs through the judicious use of an expensive CNN. Experiments on commercial video streams show that Focus is 48× (up to 92×) cheaper than using expensive CNNs for ingestion, and provides 125× (up to 607×) lower query latency than a state-of-the-art video querying system (NoScope).