REVAMP$^2$T: Real-time Edge Video Analytics for Multi-camera Privacy-aware Pedestrian Tracking

This article presents REVAMP$^2$T, Real-time Edge Video Analytics for Multi-camera Privacy-aware Pedestrian Tracking, as an integrated end-to-end IoT system for privacy-built-in decentralized situational awareness. REVAMP$^2$T presents novel algorithmic and system constructs to push deep learning and video analytics next to IoT devices (i.e. video cameras). On the algorithm side, REVAMP$^2$T proposes a unified integrated computer vision pipeline for detection, re-identification, and tracking across multiple cameras without the need for storing the streaming data. At the same time, it avoids facial recognition, and tracks and re-identifies pedestrians based on their key features at runtime. On the IoT system side, REVAMP$^2$T provides infrastructure to maximize hardware utilization on the edge, orchestrates global communications, and provides system-wide re-identification, without the use of personally identifiable information, for a distributed IoT network. For the results and evaluation, this article also proposes a new metric, Accuracy$\cdot$Efficiency (\AE), for holistic evaluation of IoT systems for real-time video analytics based on accuracy, performance, and power efficiency. REVAMP$^2$T outperforms current state-of-the-art by as much as thirteen-fold \AE~improvement.

Real-time Person Re-identification at the Edge: A Mixed Precision Approach

A critical part of multi-person multi-camera tracking is person re-identification (re-ID) algorithm, which recognizes and retains identities of all detected unknown people throughout the video stream. Many re-ID algorithms today exemplify state of the art results, but not much work has been done to explore the deployment of such algorithms for computation and power constrained real-time scenarios. In this paper, we study the effect of using a light-weight model, MobileNet-v2 for re-ID and investigate the impact of single (FP32) precision versus half (FP16) precision for training on the server and inference on the edge nodes. We further compare the results with the baseline model which uses ResNet-50 on state of the art benchmarks including CUHK03, Market-1501, and Duke-MTMC. The MobileNet-V2 mixed precision training method can improve both inference throughput on the edge node, and training time on server $3.25\times$ reaching to 27.77fps and $1.75\times$, respectively and decreases power consumption on the edge node by $1.45\times$, while it deteriorates accuracy only 5.6\% in respect to ResNet-50 single precision on the average for three different datasets. The code and pre-trained networks are publicly available at https://github.com/TeCSAR-UNCC/person-reid.