Cloud Resource Management for Analyzing Big Real-Time Visual Data from Network Cameras

Thousands of network cameras stream real-time visual data for different environments, such as streets, shopping malls, and natural scenes. The big visual data from these cameras can be useful for many applications, but analyzing the large quantities of data requires significant amounts of resources. These resources can be obtained from cloud vendors offering cloud instances (referred to as instances in this paper) with different capabilities and hourly costs. It is a challenging problem to manage cloud resources to reduce the cost for analyzing the big real-time visual data from network cameras while meeting the performance requirements. That is because the problem is affected by many factors related to the analysis programs, the cameras, and the instances. This paper proposes a cloud resource manager (referred to as manager in this paper) that aims at solving this problem. The manager estimates the resource requirements of analyzing the data stream from each camera, formulates the resource allocation problem as a 2D vector bin packing problem, and solves it using a heuristic algorithm. The resource manager monitors the allocated instances; it allocates more instances if needed and deallocates existing instances to reduce the cost if possible. The experiments show that the resource manager is able to reduce up to 60 percent of the overall cost. The experiments use multiple analysis programs, such as moving objects detection, feature tracking, and human detection. One experiment analyzes more than 97 million images (3.3 TB of data) from 5,310 cameras simultaneously over 24 hours using 15 Amazon EC2 instances costing $188.