Xingzhou Zhang

Jiashun Suo, Tianyi Wang, Xingzhou Zhang et al.

We present the HIT-UAV dataset, a high-altitude infrared thermal dataset for object detection applications on Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). The dataset comprises 2,898 infrared thermal images extracted from 43,470 frames in hundreds of videos captured by UAVs in various scenarios including schools, parking lots, roads, and playgrounds. Moreover, the HIT-UAV provides essential flight data for each image, such as flight altitude, camera perspective, date, and daylight intensity. For each image, we have manually annotated object instances with bounding boxes of two types (oriented and standard) to tackle the challenge of significant overlap of object instances in aerial images. To the best of our knowledge, the HIT-UAV is the first publicly available high-altitude UAV-based infrared thermal dataset for detecting persons and vehicles. We have trained and evaluated well-established object detection algorithms on the HIT-UAV. Our results demonstrate that the detection algorithms perform exceptionally well on the HIT-UAV compared to visual light datasets since infrared thermal images do not contain significant irrelevant information about objects. We believe that the HIT-UAV will contribute to various UAV-based applications and researches. The dataset is freely available at https://github.com/suojiashun/HIT-UAV-Infrared-Thermal-Dataset.

Jiashun Suo, Xingzhou Zhang, Weisong Shi et al.

Motivated by the advances in deep learning techniques, the application of Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV)-based object detection has proliferated across a range of fields, including vehicle counting, fire detection, and city monitoring. While most existing research studies only a subset of the challenges inherent to UAV-based object detection, there are few studies that balance various aspects to design a practical system for energy consumption reduction. In response, we present the E$^3$-UAV, an edge-based energy-efficient object detection system for UAVs. The system is designed to dynamically support various UAV devices, edge devices, and detection algorithms, with the aim of minimizing energy consumption by deciding the most energy-efficient flight parameters (including flight altitude, flight speed, detection algorithm, and sampling rate) required to fulfill the detection requirements of the task. We first present an effective evaluation metric for actual tasks and construct a transparent energy consumption model based on hundreds of actual flight data to formalize the relationship between energy consumption and flight parameters. Then we present a lightweight energy-efficient priority decision algorithm based on a large quantity of actual flight data to assist the system in deciding flight parameters. Finally, we evaluate the performance of the system, and our experimental results demonstrate that it can significantly decrease energy consumption in real-world scenarios. Additionally, we provide four insights that can assist researchers and engineers in their efforts to study UAV-based object detection further.

Xingzhou Zhang, Yifan Wang, Weisong Shi

Machine learning has changed the computing paradigm. Products today are built with machine intelligence as a central attribute, and consumers are beginning to expect near-human interaction with the appliances they use. However, much of the deep learning revolution has been limited to the cloud. Recently, several machine learning packages based on edge devices have been announced which aim to offload the computing to the edges. However, little research has been done to evaluate these packages on the edges, making it difficult for end users to select an appropriate pair of software and hardware. In this paper, we make a performance comparison of several state-of-the-art machine learning packages on the edges, including TensorFlow, Caffe2, MXNet, PyTorch, and TensorFlow Lite. We focus on evaluating the latency, memory footprint, and energy of these tools with two popular types of neural networks on different edge devices. This evaluation not only provides a reference to select appropriate combinations of hardware and software packages for end users but also points out possible future directions to optimize packages for developers.

Xingzhou Zhang, Yifan Wang, Sidi Lu et al.

In the last five years, edge computing has attracted tremendous attention from industry and academia due to its promise to reduce latency, save bandwidth, improve availability, and protect data privacy to keep data secure. At the same time, we have witnessed the proliferation of AI algorithms and models which accelerate the successful deployment of intelligence mainly in cloud services. These two trends, combined together, have created a new horizon: Edge Intelligence (EI). The development of EI requires much attention from both the computer systems research community and the AI community to meet these demands. However, existing computing techniques used in the cloud are not applicable to edge computing directly due to the diversity of computing sources and the distribution of data sources. We envision that there missing a framework that can be rapidly deployed on edge and enable edge AI capabilities. To address this challenge, in this paper we first present the definition and a systematic review of EI. Then, we introduce an Open Framework for Edge Intelligence (OpenEI), which is a lightweight software platform to equip edges with intelligent processing and data sharing capability. We analyze four fundamental EI techniques which are used to build OpenEI and identify several open problems based on potential research directions. Finally, four typical application scenarios enabled by OpenEI are presented.