Distributed and Efficient Object Detection in Edge Computing: Challenges and Solutions

In the past decade, it was a significant trend for surveillance applications to send huge amounts of real-time media data to the cloud via dedicated high-speed fiber networks. However, with the explosion of mobile devices and services in the era of Internet-of-Things, it becomes more promising to undertake real-time data processing at the edge of the network in a distributed way. Moreover, in order to reduce the investment of network deployment, media communication in surveillance applications is gradually changing to be wireless. It consequently poses great challenges to detect objects at the edge in a distributed and communication-efficient way. In this article, we propose an edge computing based object detection architecture to achieve distributed and efficient object detection via wireless communications for real-time surveillance applications. We first introduce the proposed architecture as well as its potential benefits, and identify the associated challenges in the implementation of the architecture. Then, a case study is presented to show our preliminary solution, followed by performance evaluation results. Finally, future research directions are pointed out for further studies.