Reducto: On-Camera Filtering For Resource-Efficient Real-Time Video Analytics

Abstract

To cope with the high resource (network and compute) demands of real-time video analytics pipelines, recent systems have relied on frame filtering. However, filtering has typically been done with neural networks running on edge/backend servers that are expensive to operate. This paper investigates on-camera filtering, which moves filtering to the beginning of the pipeline. Unfortunately, we find that commodity cameras have limited compute resources that only permit filtering via frame differencing based on low-level video features. Used incorrectly, such techniques can lead to unacceptable drops in query accuracy. To overcome this, we built Reducto, a system that dynamically adapts filtering decisions according to the time-varying correlation between feature type, filtering threshold, query accuracy, and video content. Experiments with a variety of videos and queries show that Reducto achieves significant (51-97% of frames) filtering benefits, while consistently meeting the desired accuracy.