Bandwidth-Efficient Live Video Analytics for Drones Via Edge Computing

Real-time video analytics on small autonomous drones poses several difficult challenges at the intersection of wireless bandwidth, processing capacity, energy consumption, result accuracy, and timeliness of results. In response to these challenges, we describe four strategies to build an adaptive computer vision pipeline for search tasks in domains such as search-and-rescue, surveillance, and wildlife conservation. Our experimental results show that a judicious combination of drone-based processing and edge-based processing can save substantial wireless bandwidth and thus improve scalability, without compromising result accuracy or result latency.