CASVA: Configuration-Adaptive Streaming for Live Video Analytics

The advent of high-accuracy and resource-intensive deep neural networks (DNNs) has fulled the development of live video analytics, where camera videos need to be streamed over the network to edge or cloud servers with sufficient computational resources. Although it is promising to strike a balance between available bandwidth and server-side DNN inference accuracy by adjusting video encoding configurations, the influences of fine-grained network and video content dynamics on configuration performance should be addressed. In this paper, we propose CASVA, a Configuration-Adaptive Streaming framework designed for live Video Analytics. The design of CASVA is motivated by our extensive measurements on how video configuration affects its bandwidth requirement and inference accuracy. To handle the complicated dynamics in live video analytics streaming, CASVA trains a deep reinforcement learning model which does not make any assumptions about the environment but learns to make configuration choices through its experiences. A variety of real-world network traces are used to drive the evaluation of CASVA. The results on a multitude of video types and video analytics tasks show the advantages of CASVA over state-of-the-art solutions.