As an emerging type of Internet of Things (IoT), multimedia IoT (MIoT) has been widely used in the domains of healthcare, smart buildings/homes, transportation and surveillance. In the mobile surveillance system for vehicle tracking, multiple mobile camera nodes capture and upload videos to a cloud server to track the target. Due to the random distribution and mobility of camera nodes, wireless networks are chosen for video transmission. However, the tracking precision can be decreased because of degradation of video quality caused by limited wireless transmission resources and transmission errors. In this paper, we propose a joint source and channel rate allocation scheme to optimize the performance of vehicle tracking in cloud servers. The proposed scheme considers the video content features that impact tracking precision for optimal rate allocation. To improve the reliability of data transmission and the real-time video communication, forward error correction is adopted in the application layer. Extensive experiments are conducted on videos from the Object Tracking Benchmark using the H.264/AVC standard and a kernelized correlation filter tracking scheme. The results show that the proposed scheme can allocate rates efficiently and provide high quality tracking service under the total transmission rate constraints.
Keywords: forward error correction; multimedia IoT; rate allocation; surveillance system; vehicle tracking; video analysis.