ECCO: Leveraging Cross-Camera Correlations for Efficient Live Video Continuous Learning

TL;DR

ECCO is a resource-efficient video analytics framework that leverages correlations across cameras to reduce costs and improve continuous learning accuracy in live video systems.

Contribution

ECCO introduces a novel grouping, GPU allocation, and transmission control approach to enable scalable, cost-effective continuous learning across multiple cameras.

Findings

Improves retraining accuracy by up to 18.1%

Supports 3.3 times more cameras at the same accuracy

Reduces compute and communication costs significantly

Abstract

Recent advances in video analytics address real-time data drift by continuously retraining specialized, lightweight DNN models for individual cameras. However, the current practice of retraining a separate model for each camera suffers from high compute and communication costs, making it unscalable. We present ECCO, a new video analytics framework designed for resource-efficient continuous learning. The key insight is that the data drift, which necessitates model retraining, often shows temporal and spatial correlations across nearby cameras. By identifying cameras that experience similar drift and retraining a shared model for them, ECCO can substantially reduce the associated compute and communication costs. Specifically, ECCO introduces: (i) a lightweight grouping algorithm that dynamically forms and updates camera groups; (ii) a GPU allocator that dynamically assigns GPU resources across different groups to improve retraining accuracy and ensure fairness; and (iii) a transmission controller at each camera that configures frame sampling and coordinates bandwidth sharing with other cameras based on its assigned GPU resources. We conducted extensive evaluations on three distinctive datasets for two vision tasks. Compared to leading baselines, ECCO improves retraining accuracy by 6.7%-18.1% using the same compute and communication resources, or supports 3.3 times more concurrent cameras at the same accuracy.