Part of Proceedings of Machine Learning and Systems 6 (MLSys 2024) Conference
Shan Yu, Zhenting Zhu, Yu Chen, Hanchen Xu, Pengzhan Zhao, Yang Wang, Arthi Padmanabhan, Hugo Latapie, Harry Xu
Video analytics is widely used in contemporary systems and services. At the forefront of video analytics are video queries that users develop to find objects of particular interest. Building upon the insight that video objects (e.g., human, animals, cars, etc.), the center of video analytics, are similar in spirit to objects modeled by traditional object-oriented languages, we propose to develop an object-oriented approach to video analytics. This approach, named VQPy, consists of a front-end— a Python variant with constructs that make it easy for users to express video objects and their interactions—as well as an extensible backend that can automatically construct and optimize pipelines based on video objects. We have implemented and open-sourced VQPy, which is currently used in a major tech company as part of their DeepVision framework.