Edge Video Analytics for Public Safety: A Review

Abstract

With the installation of enormous public safety and transportation infrastructure cameras, video analytics has come to play an essential part in public safety. Typically, video analytics is to collectively leverage the advanced computer vision (CV) and artificial intelligence (AI) to solve the four-W problem. That is to identify Who has done something (What) at a specific place (Where) at some time (When). According to the difference of latency requirements, video analytics can be applied to postevent retrospective analysis, such as archive management, search, forensic investigation and real-time live video stream analysis, such as situation awareness, alerting, and interested object (criminal suspect/missing vehicle) detection. The latter is characterized as having higher requirements on hardware resources as the sophisticated image processing algorithms under the hood. However, analyzing large-scale live video streams on the Cloud is impractical as the edge solution that conducts the video analytics on (or close to) the camera provides a silvering light. Analyzing live video streams on the edge is not trivial due to the constrained hardware resources on edge. The AI-dominated video analytics requires higher bandwidth, consumes considerable CPU/GPU resources for processing, and demands larger memory for caching. In this paper, we review the applications, algorithms, and solutions that have been proposed recently to facilitate edge video analytics for public safety.