Front-End Smart Visual Sensing and Back-End Intelligent Analysis: A Unified Infrastructure for Economizing the Visual System of City Brain

The visual data, which are acquired from the ubiquitous visual sensors deployed in metropolitans, are of great value and paramount significance to enhance the effectiveness and pursue the future development of smart cities. In this paper, the essential building blocks of the unified visual data management and analysis infrastructure that serve as the foundation for the economical visual system in the city brain, are introduced to facilitate the utilization of the visual signal in the artificial intelligence era. In particular, we start by the discussion of the front-end smart visual sensing in the context of economical communication and service with the heterogeneous network, and the functionalities and necessities of compact visual feature and deep learning model representations are detailed. Subsequently, the utilities of the infrastructure are demonstrated through two intelligent applications at the back-end, including vehicle re-identification and person re-identification. The standardizations regarding compact feature and deep neural network representations, which are regarded as the key ingredients in this infrastructure and greatly facilitate the construction of the visual system in the city brain, are also discussed. Finally, we envision how the potential issues regarding the economical visual communications for future smart cities might be pragmatically approached within this unified infrastructure.