In-Vehicle Edge System for Real-Time Dashcam Video Analysis

Abstract: Modern vehicles equip dashcams that primarily collect visual evidence for traffic accidents. However, most of the video data collected by dashcams that is not related to traffic accidents is discarded without any use. In this paper, we present a use case for dashcam videos that aims to improve driving safety. By analyzing the real-time videos captured by dashcams, we can detect driving hazards and driver distractedness to alert the driver immediately. To that end, we design and implement a Distributed Edge-based dashcam Video Analytics system (DEVA), that analyzes dashcam videos using personal edge (mobile) devices in a vehicle. DEVA consolidates available in-vehicle edge devices to maintain the resource pool, distributes video frames for analysis to devices considering resource availability in each device, and dynamically adjusts frame rates of dashcams to control the overall workloads. The entire video analytics task is divided into multiple independent phases and executed in a pipelined manner to improve the overall frame processing throughput. We implement DEVA in an Android app and also develop a dashcam emulation app to be used in vehicles that are not equipped with dashcams. Experimental results using the apps and commercial smartphones show that DEVA can process real-time videos from two dashcams with frame rates of around 22~30 FPS per camera within 200 ms of latency, using three high-end devices.