Big Data and development of smart city: System architecture and practical public safety example

Abstract

The concept of Smart City started its development path around two to three decades ago; it has been mainly influenced and driven by radical changes in technological, social and business environments. Big Data, Internet of Things and Networked Cyber-Physical Systems, together with the concepts of Cloud, Fog and Edge Computing, have tremendous impact on the development of Smart City, reforming its frame and tasks and redefining its requirements and challenges. We consider feasible architectures of the IT infrastructure and signal processing, taking into account aspects of Big Data, followed by summary of benefits and main challenges, like security of infrastructure and private data. As a practical example we present a public safety application of multi-sensor imaging system: a smart device with target detection subsystem based on artificial intelligence used for activation of target tracking. The experiments have been performed in the cities of Abu Dhabi and Belgrade, which have very different environment. The experiments have shown the effects of videostreaming compression on thermal imagers and the importance of distributed processing power that optimizes requirements for amount of transmitted data and delay.