Connected Smartphones and High-Performance Servers for Remote Object Detection

Object detection is one of the main challenges of cyber-physical systems for mobile applications. Mobile devices as embedded systems might not provide sufficient performance to meet the computational requirements for object detection, whereas it is not reasonable to enhance such devices with powerful processors. In this paper, we present a prototype system for mobile object detection based on smartphones and high-performance servers supplemented with graphics processing units (GPUs). The basic idea in the design of this system is to offload expensive image processing on a remote server over a wireless network, which allows mobile devices to support high-precision object detection. We describe an experimental evaluation using Android smartphones and high-end workstation with NVIDIA GPUs. Our conclusion is that mobile object detection is achievable at the expense of millisecond latency due to the communication between the mobile device and the remote server.