Visual IoT: Architectural Challenges and Opportunities

......The emergence of ultra-lowpower sensing devices along with connectivity to gateways and cloud services has led to an end-to-end Internet of Things (IoT) architecture for many realworld usages. Visual IoT is one such class of IoT that poses significant end-toend challenges due to the need for sensing and processing of visual data. The richness of visual data provides many opportunities for analytics, while at the same time requiring high computational capabilities and therefore potentially high-bandwidth data transfer to a more powerful node in the end-to-end architecture. Memory and storage needs are also more pronounced in visual IoT solutions, requiring careful thought to developing an intelligent memory hierarchy for visual storage and retrieval. In this article, I examine the computing, memory, and interface implications for end-to-end visual IoT architectures and discuss potential solutions and tradeoffs in each of these areas. Before we start, let’s go over a brief overview of visual IoT usage domains.