Kestrel: Video analytics for augmented multi-camera vehicle tracking

Abstract

In the future, the video-enabled camera will be the most pervasive type of sensor in the Internet of Things. Such cameras will enable continuous surveillance through heterogeneous camera networks consisting of fixed camera systems as well as cameras on mobile devices. The challenge in these networks is to enable efficient video analytics: the ability to process videos cheaply and quickly to enable searching for specific events or sequences of events. In this paper, we discuss the design and implementation of Kestrel, a video analytics system that tracks the path of vehicles across a heterogeneous camera network. In Kestrel, fixed camera feeds are processed on the cloud, and mobile devices are invoked only to resolve ambiguities in vehicle tracks. Kestrel's mobile device pipeline detects objects using a deep neural network, extracts attributes using cheap visual features, and resolves path ambiguities by careful association of vehicle visual descriptors, while using several optimizations to conserve energy and reduce latency. Our evaluations show that Kestrel can achieve precision and recall comparable to a fixed camera network of the same size and topology, while reducing energy usage on mobile devices by more than an order of magnitude.