Delivering Deep Learning to Mobile Devices via Offloading

Deep learning has the potential to make Augmented Reality (AR) devices smarter, but few AR apps use such technology today because it is compute-intensive, and front-end devices cannot deliver sufficient compute power. We propose a distributed framework that ties together front-end devices with more powerful back-end "helpers" that allow deep learning to be executed locally or to be offloaded. This framework should be able to intelligently use current estimates of network conditions and back-end server loads, in conjunction with the application's requirements, to determine an optimal strategy. This work reports our preliminary investigation in implementing such a framework, in which the front-end is assumed to be smartphones. Our specific contributions include: (1) development of an Android application that performs real-time object detection, either locally on the smartphone or remotely on a server; and (2) characterization of the tradeoffs between object detection accuracy, latency, and battery drain, based on the system parameters of video resolution, deep learning model size, and offloading decision.