Fedvision: Federated video analytics with edge computing

Abstract

Widely deployed smart cameras are generating a large amount of video data and capable of processing frames on devices. Empowered by edge computing, the video data can also be offloaded to edge servers for processing. By leveraging the on-device processing and computation offloading, we propose a federated video analytics system named FedVision to efficiently provision video analytics across devices and servers. The challenge of designing FedVision is to optimally use the computing and networking resources for video analytics. Since there is no closed-form expression of the system performance, black-box optimization is employed to optimize the system performance. However, using black-box optimization directly incurs excessive system queries that lead to very poor system performance. To solve this problem, we design a new optimization method that integrates black-box optimization with Neural Processes (NPs) as a system performance approximator. This method allows black-box optimizer to query NPs instead of the real system. We validate the performance of FedVision and the new optimization method using both numerical results and experiments with a testbed.