WatchDog: Real-time Vehicle Tracking on Geo-distributed Edge Nodes

Abstract: Vehicle tracking, a core application to smart city video analytics, is becoming more widely deployed than ever before thanks to the increasing number of traffic cameras and recent advances of computer vision and machine learning. Due to the constraints of bandwidth, latency, and privacy concerns, tracking tasks are more preferable to run on edge devices sitting close to the cameras. However, edge devices are provisioned with a fixed amount of compute budget, making them incompetent to adapt to time-varying tracking workloads caused by traffic dynamics. In coping with this challenge, we propose WatchDog, a real-time vehicle tracking system fully utilizes edge nodes across the road network. WatchDog leverages computer vision tasks with different resource-accuracy trade-offs, and decompose and schedule tracking tasks judiciously across edge devices based on the current workload to maximize the number of tasks while ensuring a provable response time bound at each edge device. Extensive evaluations have been conducted using real-world city-wide vehicle trajectory datasets, showing a 100% tracking coverage with real-time guarantee.