BS-MCVR: Binary-sensing based Mobile-cloud Visual Recognition

The mobile-cloud based visual recognition (MCVR) system, in which the low-end mobile sensors are deployed to persistently collect and transmit visual data to the cloud for analysis and recognition, is important for visual monitoring applications such as wildfire detection, wildlife monitoring, etc. However, the current MCVR systems are mostly human-perception-oriented, which consume many computational resources and much energy for data sensing as well as much bandwidth for data transmission, limiting their large-scale deployment. In this work, we present a machine-perception-oriented MCVR system, called BS-MCVR, where the mobile end is designed to efficiently sense highly compact and discriminative features directly from the scene, and the sensed features are analyzed on the cloud for recognition. Particularly, the mobile end is designed to operate with completely binary operations and generate fixed-point feature maps. Experiments on benchmark datasets show that our system only needs to transmit 1/200 the amount of original image data without degrading much the recognition accuracy, while it consumes minimal computational cost in the data sensing process. BS-MCVR provides a highly cost-effective solution for deploying MCVR systems at a large-scale.