Gecko: Resource-Efficient and Accurate Queries in Real-Time Video Streams at the Edge

Surveillance cameras are ubiquitous nowadays and users’ increasing needs for accessing real-world information (e.g., finding abandoned luggage) have urged object queries in real-time videos. While recent real-time video query processing systems exhibit excellent performance, they lack utility in deployment in practice as they overlook some crucial aspects, including multi-camera exploration, resource contention, and content awareness. Motivated by these issues, we propose a framework Gecko, to provide resource-efficient and accurate real-time object queries of massive videos on edge devices. Gecko (i) obtains optimal models from the model zoo and assigns them to edge devices for executing current queries, (ii) optimizes resource usage of the edge cluster at runtime by dynamically adjusting the frame query interval of each video stream and forking/joining running models on edge devices, and (iii) improves accuracy in changing video scenes by fine-grained stream transfer and continuous learning of models. Our evaluation with real-world video streams and queries shows that Gecko achieves up to 2x more resource efficiency gains and increases overall query accuracy by at least 12% compared with prior work, further delivering excellent scalability for practical deployment.