Edge Assisted Real-time Instance Segmentation on Mobile Devices

Accurate and real-time instance segmentation on mobile devices enables a wide spectrum of applications such as augmented reality, context-aware inspection and environ-mental cognition. However, the computation resource demanded by instance segmentation impedes its deployment on resource-constrained commercial mobile devices. Prior studies enable smartphones to conduct computational-intensive tasks in real-time with the assistance of an edge server. However, simply applying an edge-assisted framework hardly achieves delightful segmentation performance due to the movements of devices and targets, pixel-level precision requirements, and huge computational overhead even for edge nodes. This work proposes edgeIS, an edge-assisted system that enables real-time and accurate instance segmentation on mobile devices. edgeIS embraces the mobile device sensing ability of surroundings and its own motion, and redesigns an innovative mobile-edge collaboration paradigm suitable for segmentation tasks. We implement edgeIS on a lightweight edge node and different mobile devices. Extensive experiments are conducted under four datasets. The results show that edgeIS can run on mobile devices in real-time and achieve a 0.92 segmentation IoU, outperforming existing state-of-the-art solutions. We further embed edgeIS in an AR-based inspection system deployed in an oil field and the performance of edgeIS meets the demand of the industrial scenario.