Efficient architectures and algorithms for distributed video analytics for Smart Cities
Most of the smart city components, as articulated by the 20 candidate cities chosen for Smart City implementation by the Indian Government, can greatly benefit by the use of cameras as sensing devices. Examples include surveillance, smart parking, transit management, etc. This is not surprising as cameras are a very versatile and rich sensor and hence one can extract useful information to enable a diverse set of applications. However, the negative is the high data bandwidth required to transfer data from the cameras to the computing center. Hence it is imperative that one explore ways of analyzing the camera data at the edge so that only useful information is sent to the computing center, thus minimizing bandwidth. At the same time, the whole system needs to be flexible enough to allow programmatic control of what useful information to extract as this depends on the actual application. Hence this forms the basic premise and problem for this proposal.