Visual IoT: Enabling Internet of Things Visualization in Smart Cities

With advanced IoT, visualization has become an integral part of smart city services in our daily life ranging from building management, property maintenance, autonomous vehicles, healthcare, and shopping to tourism. In visual IoT, visualized sensors like cameras are a key component to smart cities. However, requirements of large bandwidth for visual data and the gap between computation and communication challenge the development of visual IoT. This article presents a systemic analysis for the requirements of visual IoT from the perspective of smart cities. Moreover, this study proposes a novel visual IoT architecture to improve end-to-end performance of next generation smart cities, namely A-VIoT. The proposed system includes six key components: intelligent awareness to sense complex environments, smart video analysis for reducing the amount of visual data, software defined video to generate elastic visual streams, flexible controls to produce optimal adaptation, economic transmission to enhance utilization of resource, and crowd coordination to improve the performance of cooperation. Finally, several open issues are identified to provide directions for further research, particularly in smart city applications.