Bandwidth on a Budget: Real-Time Configuration for Edge Video Analysis

In an era marked by technological innovation, visual applications have become ubiquitous in everyday life. Harnessing the power of computer vision, these applications process and interpret video data from edge cameras, facilitating tasks such as object detection and vehicle counting. Yet, implementing complex deep learning models on cameras with limited computational capacity poses significant challenges. Furthermore, the bandwidth constraints and fluctuating nature of wide-area networks present substantial difficulties for video analysis systems dependent on cloud computing. This paper first characterizes the relationship between different parameter combinations (such as frame rate and resolution) and video analysis accuracy through offline analysis. It proposes a video stream analysis configuration selection scheme, SPStream, for slowly changing scenes, and a configuration file switching strategy, SPStream+, for rapidly changing scenes. These strategies use idle resources at the camera edge end to select the optimal configuration in real-time, adjust video encoding quality, and dynamically switch configuration files based on the changing states of object motion. Finally, a real-time video stream analysis system for vehicle counting and pedestrian detection suitable for both scenarios is designed, which saves bandwidth to the greatest extent while meeting the accuracy requirements of users and achieving high accuracy of video analysis.