Deep Reinforcement Learning-Empowered Cost-Effective Federated Video Surveillance Management Framework

Abstract

Video surveillance systems are integral to bolstering safety and security across multiple settings. With the advent of deep learning (DL), a specialization within machine learning (ML), these systems have been significantly augmented to facilitate DL-based video surveillance services with notable precision. Nevertheless, DL-based video surveillance services, which necessitate the tracking of object movement and motion tracking (e.g., to identify unusual object behaviors), can demand a significant portion of computational and memory resources. This includes utilizing GPU computing power for model inference and allocating GPU memory for model loading. To tackle the computational demands inherent in DL-based video surveillance, this study introduces a novel video surveillance management system designed to optimize operational efficiency. At its core, the system is built on a two-tiered edge computing architecture (i.e., client and server through socket transmission). In this architecture, the primary edge (i.e., client side) handles the initial processing tasks, such as object detection, and is connected via a Universal Serial Bus (USB) cable to the Closed-Circuit Television (CCTV) camera, directly at the source of the video feed. This immediate processing reduces the latency of data transfer by detecting objects in real time. Meanwhile, the secondary edge (i.e., server side) plays a vital role by hosting a dynamically controlling threshold module targeted at releasing DL-based models, reducing needless GPU usage. This module is a novel addition that dynamically adjusts the threshold time value required to release DL models. By dynamically optimizing this threshold, the system can effectively manage GPU usage, ensuring resources are allocated efficiently. Moreover, we utilize federated learning (FL) to streamline the training of a Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) network for predicting imminent object appearances by amalgamating data from diverse camera sources while ensuring data privacy and optimized resource allocation. Furthermore, in contrast to the static threshold values or moving average techniques used in previous approaches for the controlling threshold module, we employ a Deep Q-Network (DQN) methodology to manage threshold values dynamically. This approach efficiently balances the trade-off between GPU memory conservation and the reloading latency of the DL model, which is enabled by incorporating LSTM-derived predictions as inputs to determine the optimal timing for releasing the DL model. The results highlight the potential of our approach to significantly improve the efficiency and effective usage of computational resources in video surveillance systems, opening the door to enhanced security in various domains.