Machine-Centric High-Accuracy Multi-Video Analytics With Adaptive Neural Codecs
Andong Zhu, Ji Qi, Sheng Zhang, Gangyi Luo, Ke Cheng, Xiaohang Shi, Zhuzhong Qian, Baoliu Ye, Sanglu Lu · IEEE Transactions on Networking · 2025
Increased videos captured by widely deployed cameras are being analyzed by computer vision-based Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) on servers rather than being streamed for humans. Unfortunately, the conventional codecs (e.g., H.26x and MPEG-x) originally designed for video streaming lack content-aware feature extraction and hinder machine-centric video analytics, making it difficult to achieve the required high accuracy with tolerable delay. Neural codecs (e.g., autoencoder) now hold impressive compression performance and have been widely advocated in video streaming. While autoencoder shows transformative potential, the application in video analytics is hampered by low accuracy in detecting small objects of high-resolution videos and the serious challenges posed by multi-video streaming. To this end, we propose AdaStreamer with adaptive neural codecs to enable real machine-centric high-accuracy multi-video analytics. We also investigate how to achieve optimal accuracy under delay constraints via careful scheduling in Compression Ratios (CRs, the ratio of the compressed size to the original data size) and bandwidth allocation, and further propose a Markov-based Adaptive Compression and Bandwidth Allocation algorithm (MACBA). We have practically developed a prototype of AdaStreamer, based on which extensive experiments verify its accuracy improvement (up to 15%) compared to state-of-the-art coding and streaming solutions.