Vision Paper: Towards Software-Defined Video Analytics with Cross-Camera Collaboration

Video cameras are becoming ubiquitous in our daily lives. With the recent advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AI), live video analytics are enabling various useful services, including traffic monitoring and campus surveillance. However, current video analytics systems are highly limited in leveraging the enormous opportunities of the deployed cameras due to (i) centralized processing architecture (i.e., cameras are treated as dumb streaming-only sensors), (ii) hard-coded analytics capabilities from tightly coupled hardware and software, (iii) isolated and fragmented camera deployment from different service providers, and (iv) independent processing of camera streams without any collaboration. In this paper, we envision a full-fledged system for software-defined video analytics with cross-camera collaboration that overcomes the aforementioned limitations. We illustrate its detailed system architecture, carefully analyze the key system requirements with representative app scenarios, and derive potential research issues along with a summary of the status quo of existing works.