Edge-based fever screening system over private 5G

TL;DR

This paper introduces a real-time, edge-based fever screening system utilizing private 5G and novel deep learning techniques, achieving high accuracy and efficiency in critical environments.

Contribution

It presents the first edge and 5G-enabled cross-spectral object association method for fever screening with novel GAN architectures and loss functions.

Findings

Achieves 98.5% accuracy in fever detection

Processes 5 times more individuals than cloud-based systems

Operates in real-time at 30 ms per frame

Abstract

Edge computing and 5G have made it possible to perform analytics closer to the source of data and achieve super-low latency response times, which is not possible with centralized cloud deployment. In this paper, we present a novel fever-screening system, which uses edge machine learning techniques and leverages private 5G to accurately identify and screen individuals with fever in real-time. Particularly, we present deep-learning based novel techniques for fusion and alignment of cross-spectral visual and thermal data streams at the edge. Our novel Cross-Spectral Generative Adversarial Network (CS-GAN) synthesizes visual images that have the key, representative object level features required to uniquely associate objects across visual and thermal spectrum. Two key features of CS-GAN are a novel, feature-preserving loss function that results in high-quality pairing of corresponding cross-spectral objects, and dual bottleneck residual layers with skip connections (a new, network enhancement) to not only accelerate real-time inference, but to also speed up convergence during model training at the edge. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first technique that leverages 5G networks and limited edge resources to enable real-time feature-level association of objects in visual and thermal streams (30 ms per full HD frame on an Intel Core i7-8650 4-core, 1.9GHz mobile processor). To the best of our knowledge, this is also the first system to achieve real-time operation, which has enabled fever screening of employees and guests in arenas, theme parks, airports and other critical facilities. By leveraging edge computing and 5G, our fever screening system is able to achieve 98.5% accuracy and is able to process about 5X more people when compared to a centralized cloud deployment.