Efficient Feature Compression for Edge-Cloud Systems

Zhihao Duan, Fengqing Zhu

Abstract: Optimizing computation in an edge-cloud system is an important yet challenging problem. In this paper, we consider a three way trade-off between bit rate, classification accuracy, and encoding complexity in an edge-cloud image classification system. Our method includes a new training strategy and an efficient encoder architecture to improve the rate-accuracy performance. Our design can also be easily scaled according to different computation resources on the edge device, taking a step towards achieving rate-accuracy-complexity (RAC) trade-off. Under various settings, our feature coding system consistently outperforms previous methods in terms of the RAC performance. Code is made publicly available <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">1</sup> .