Impact of Input Data on Intelligence Partitioning Decisions for IoT Smart Camera Nodes

Abstract

Image processing systems exploit image information for a purpose determined by the application at hand. The implementation of image processing systems in an Internet of Things (IoT) context is a challenge due to the amount of data in an image processing system, which affects the three main node constraints: memory, latency and energy. One method to address these challenges is the partitioning of tasks between the IoT node and a server. In this work, we present an in-depth analysis of how the input image size and its content within the conventional image processing systems affect the decision on where tasks should be implemented, with respect to node energy and latency. We focus on explaining how the characteristics of the image are transferred through the system until finally influencing partition decisions. Our results show that the image size affects significantly the efficiency of the node offloading configurations. This is mainly due to the dominant cost of communication over processing as the image size increases. Furthermore, we observed that image content has limited effects in the node offloading analysis.