Scalable crowd-sourcing of video from mobile devices

• DOI: 10.1145/2462456.2464440
• Publication Date: 2013-06-25
• Authors: Pieter Simoens; Yu Xiao; Padmanabhan Pillai; Zhuo Chen; Kiryong Ha; Mahadev Satyanara...
• Keywords: Technology and Engineering; 0202 electrical engineering, electronic engineering, information engineering; IBCN; 02 engineering and technology; Upload; Cloudlet

We propose a scalable Internet system for continuous collection of crowd-sourced video from devices such as Google Glass. Our hybrid cloud architecture, GigaSight, is effectively a Content Delivery Network (CDN) in reverse. It achieves scalability by decentralizing the collection infrastructure using cloudlets based on virtual machines~(VMs). Based on time, location, and content, privacy sensitive information is automatically removed from the video. This process, which we refer to as denaturing, is executed in a user-specific VM on the cloudlet. Users can perform content-based searches on the total catalog of denatured videos. Our experiments reveal the bottlenecks for video upload, denaturing, indexing, and content-based search. They also provide insight on how parameters such as frame rate and resolution impact scalability.