EDGE ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE: A MULTI-CAMERA VIDEO SURVEILLANCE APPLICATION

Nowadays, video surveillance has a crucial role. Analyzing surveillance videos is, however, a time consuming and tiresome procedure. In the last years, artificial intelligence paved the way for automatic and accurate surveillance-video analysis. In parallel to the development of artificial-intelligence methodologies, edge computing is becoming an active field of research with the final goal to provide cost-effective and real time deployment of the developed methodologies. In this work, we present an edge artificial intelligence application to video surveillance. Our approach relies on a set of four IP cameras, which acquire video frames that are processed on the edge using the NVIDIA (R) Jetson Nano. A state-of-the-art deep-learning model, called Single Shot multibox Detector (SSD) MobileNetV2 network, is used to perform object and people detection in realtime. The proposed infrastructure obtained an inference speed of similar to 10.0 Frames per Second (FPS) for each parallel video stream. These results prompt the possibility of translating our work into a real word scenario. The integration of the presented application into a wider monitoring system with a central unit could bring benefits to the overall infrastructure. Indeed our application could send only video-related high-level information to the central unit, allowing it to combine information with data coming from other sensing devices without unuseful data overload. This would ensure a fast response in case of emergency or detected anomalies. We hope this work will contribute to stimulate the research in the field of edge artificial intelligence for video surveillance.