Toward Scalable Video Analytics Using Compressed-Domain Features at the Edge

Abstract

Intelligent video analytics systems have come to play an essential role in many fields, including public safety, transportation safety, and many other industrial areas, such as automated tools for data extraction, and analyzing huge datasets, such as multiple live video streams transmitted from a large number of cameras. A key characteristic of such systems is that it is critical to perform real-time analytics so as to provide timely actionable alerts on various tasks, activities, and conditions. Due to the computation-intensive and bandwidth-intensive nature of these operations, however, video analytics servers may not fulfill the requirements when serving a large number of cameras simultaneously. To handle these challenges, we present an edge computing-based system that minimizes the transfer of video data from the surveillance camera feeds on a cloud video analytics server. Based on a novel approach of utilizing the information from the encoded bitstream, the edge can achieve low processing complexity of object tracking in surveillance videos and filter non-motion frames from the list of data that will be forwarded to the cloud server. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, we implemented a video surveillance prototype consisting of edge devices with low computational capacity and a GPU-enabled server. The evaluation results show that our method can efficiently catch the characteristics of the frame and is compatible with the edge-to-cloud platform in terms of accuracy and delay sensitivity. The average processing time of this method is approximately 39 ms/frame with high definition resolution video, which outperforms most of the state-of-the-art methods. In addition to the scenario implementation of the proposed system, the method helps the cloud server reduce 49% of the load of the GPU, 49% that of the CPU, and 55% of the network traffic while maintaining the accuracy of video analytics event detection.