Scalable Object Detection for Edge Cloud Environments

Object detection is an important problem in a wide variety of computer vision applications for sustainable smart cities. Deep neural networks (DNNs) have attracted increasing interest in object detection due to their potential to provide high accuracy detection performance in challenging scenarios. However, DNNs involve high computational complexity and are therefore challenging to deploy under the tighter resource constraints of edge cloud environments compared to more resource-abundant platforms, such as conventional cloud computing platforms. Moreover, the monolithic structure of conventional DNN implementations limit their utility under the dynamically changing operational conditions that are typical in edge cloud computing. In this paper, we address these challenges and limitations of conventional DNN implementation techniques by introducing a new resource-adaptive scheme for DNN-based object detection. This scheme applies the recently-introduced concept of elastic neural networks, which involves the incorporation of multiple outputs within intermediate stages of the neural network backbone. We demonstrate a novel elastic DNN design for object detection, and we show how the other methods for streamlining resource requirements, in particular network pruning, can be applied in conjunction with the proposed elastic network approach. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate the ability of our methods to efficiently trade-off computational complexity and object detection accuracy for scalable deployment.