An IoT-enabled real-time overhead view person detection system based on Cascade-RCNN and transfer learning

Abstract

Internet of things (IoT) is transforming technological evolution in several practical applications. These applications range from smart cities, smart healthcare to intelligent video surveillance, where the primary interest is person monitoring and detection. The amalgamation of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and IoT-based techniques maintain a balance between computational cost and efficiency that is essential for next-generation IoT networks. In this context, a real-time IoT-enabled people detection system is introduced. The developed system performs image processing task over the cloud using an internet connection, thus reduces the computational cost by processing high-resolution images over the cloud. For person detection, a pre-trained Cascade RCNN, a deep learning approach is used. It is an object detection architecture, seeks to address discrediting performance with increased Intersection over Union (IoU) thresholds. As the architecture is pre-trained with COCO data set and the person body’s appearance in overhead perspective is significantly different; thus, additional training is performed to enhance the detection results. Taking advantage of transfer learning architecture is trained for overhead person images, and the newly trained feature layer is added to the existing architecture. Experimental outcomes reveal that additional training increases the detection architecture’s performance with an accuracy rate of 0.96.