A Systematic Literature Review on Distributed Machine Learning in Edge Computing

Distributed edge intelligence is a disruptive research area that enables the execution of machine learning and deep learning (ML/DL) algorithms close to where data are generated. Since edge devices are more limited and heterogeneous than typical cloud devices, many hindrances have to be overcome to fully extract the potential benefits of such an approach (such as data-in-motion analytics). In this paper, we investigate the challenges of running ML/DL on edge devices in a distributed way, paying special attention to how techniques are adapted or designed to execute on these restricted devices. The techniques under discussion pervade the processes of caching, training, inference, and offloading on edge devices. We also explore the benefits and drawbacks of these strategies

Pedestrian detection and tracking using stereo vision techniques

Automated pedestrian detection, counting and tracking has received significant attention from the computer vision community of late. Many of the person detection techniques described so far in the literature work well in controlled environments, such as laboratory settings with a small number of people. This allows various assumptions to be made that simplify this complex problem. The performance of these techniques, however, tends to deteriorate when presented with unconstrained environments where pedestrian appearances, numbers, orientations, movements, occlusions and lighting conditions violate these convenient assumptions. Recently, 3D stereo information has been proposed as a technique to overcome some of these issues and to guide pedestrian detection. This thesis presents such an approach, whereby after obtaining robust 3D information via a novel disparity estimation technique, pedestrian detection is performed via a 3D point clustering process within a region-growing framework. This clustering process avoids using hard thresholds by using bio-metrically inspired constraints and a number of plan view statistics. This pedestrian detection technique requires no external training and is able to robustly handle challenging real-world unconstrained environments from various camera positions and orientations. In addition, this thesis presents a continuous detect-and-track approach, with additional kinematic constraints and explicit occlusion analysis, to obtain robust temporal tracking of pedestrians over time. These approaches are experimentally validated using challenging datasets consisting of both synthetic data and real-world sequences gathered from a number of environments. In each case, the techniques are evaluated using both 2D and 3D groundtruth methodologies