Parallel Processing Techniques for Analyzing Large Video Files: a Deep Learning Based Approach
Azhar Talha Syed, Shikharesh Majumdar · 2022
Videos are a popular type of media that require analysis to extract the information underlying the data in a timely manner. Often due to the very large size of such data and the involvement of computationally expensive operations, performing the analysis can take a significant amount of time. This paper presents techniques to speed up deep learning-based analysis to perform tasks like tracking objects and filtering video data by applying parallel processing techniques. The proposed approach and techniques leverage parallel processing on two levels: by using GPUs for analyzing individual frames and by distributing the processing load over a fleet of Executor nodes. Experiments with Apache Spark and TensorFlow-based prototypes built for handling various video analysis use cases were conducted on an Amazon EC2 cloud for various combinations of system and workload parameters. Insights into system performance including the reduction in processing time that accrues from applying the proposed parallel processing technique in each scenario are reported in the paper.