Vision Language Models (VLMs) can enhance Internet of Things (IoT) applications by efficiently extracting valuable information from excessively long videos captured by IoT cameras. Due to the large volume of video data and the high computation overhead of VLMs, a practical deployment strategy is to transmit the video to the cloud only on demand and also deploy the VLMs on the cloud for video analytics. Yet, the interaction experience between humans and VLMs is degraded by the high latency in such cloud-edge collaboration applications. The latency is caused by both the video transmission process and the heavy VLM inference process. We propose SwiftReTaKe, a two-round transmission framework coupled with a low-latency pre-pruning strategy to reduce both network and inference latency. By first sending keyframes for relevance estimation and then adaptively transmitting informative frames, SwiftReTaKe minimizes data transfer and LLM computation. Compared to the state-of-the-art (SOTA) long video processing method, SwiftReTaKe reduces the latency by 6 times with only 3.33% accuracy drop.

Neural enhancement through super-resolution (SR) deep neural networks (DNNs) opens up new possibilities for ultra-high-definition (UHD) live streaming. Yet, the heavy SR DNN inference overhead leads to severe deployment challenges. To reduce the overhead, existing systems propose to apply DNN-based SR only on carefully selected anchor frames while upscaling non-anchor frames via the lightweight reusing-based SR approach. However, frame-level scheduling is coarse-grained and fails to deliver optimal efficiency. In this work, we propose Palantír, the first neural-enhanced UHD live streaming system with fine-grained patch-level scheduling.

Streaming services have billions of mobile subscribers, yet video piracy has cost service providers billions. Digital Rights Management (DRM), however, is still far from satisfactory. Unlike DRM, which attempts to prohibit the creation of pirated copies, fingerprinting may be used to track out the source of piracy. Nevertheless, existing fingerprinting-based streaming systems are not widely used since they fail to serve numerous users. In this paper, we present the design and evaluation of StreamingTag, a scalable piracy tracing system for mobile streaming services. StreamingTag adopts a segment-level fingerprint embedding scheme to remove the need of re-embedding the fingerprint into the video for each new viewer. The key innovations of StreamingTag include a scalable and CDN-friendly delivery framework, an accurate and lightweight temporal synchronization scheme, a polarized and randomized SVD watermarking scheme, and a collusion-resistant fingerprinting scheme. Experiment results show the good QoS of StreamingTag in terms of preparation latency, bandwidth consumption, and video fidelity. Compared with existing methods, the proposed three schemes improve the re-identification accuracy by 4-49x, the watermark extraction accuracy by 2.25x at most and 1.5x on average, and the recall rate of catching colluders by 26%.

Streaming services have billions of mobile subscribers, yet video piracy has cost service providers billions. Digital Rights Management (DRM), however, is still far from satisfactory. Unlike DRM, which attempts to prohibit the creation of pirated copies, fingerprinting may be used to track out the source of piracy. Nevertheless, the idea of piracy tracing is not widely used at the moment, since existing fingerprinting-based streaming systems fail to serve numerous users. In this paper, we present the design and evaluation of StreamingTag, a scalable piracy tracing system for mobile streaming services. StreamingTag adopts a segment-level fingerprint embedding scheme to remove the need of re-embedding the fingerprint into the video for each new viewer. The key innovations of StreamingTag include a scalable and CDN-friendly delivery framework, a polarized and randomized SVD watermarking scheme suitable for short segments, and a collusion-resistant fingerprinting scheme optimized for large-scale streaming services. Experiment results show the good QoS of StreamingTag in terms of preparation latency, bandwidth consumption, and video fidelity. Compared with existing SVD watermarking schemes, the proposed watermarking scheme improves the watermark extraction accuracy by 2.25x at most and 1.5x on average. Compared with existing collusion-resistant fingerprinting schemes, the proposed scheme catches more colluders and improves the recall rate by 26%.