Dubbed SPROCKET, the system can process two hours of video in 30 seconds at a cost less than $1; it is particularly well suited for image searches within videos
Harassing the power of cloud computing, scientists at the University of California San Diego have reportedly developed a new technology that can encode, transform and edit video faster — several orders of magnitude faster — than the current state of the art.
Dubbed SPROCKET, the system not only cut down the amount of time needed to process video, it is also extremely cheap. The system can process two hours of video in 30 seconds at a cost less than $1.
This was made possible by an innovative process that breaks down video files into extremely small pieces and then moves these pieces between thousands of servers every few thousands of a second for processing.
All this happens in the cloud and allows researchers to harness a large amount of computing power in a very short amount of time.This type of parallel computing in the cloud is offered by several big companies, including Amazon, Microsoft and Google.
Cloud computing have made possible to have access to thousands of servers, for fractions of a second, for just a few dollars, said researchers at UC San Diego.
Sprocket was developed and written by CSE graduate students Lixiang Ao and Liz Izhikevich (now a PhD student at Stanford).They presented their work at the ACM Symposium on Cloud Computing in Carlsbad, Calif.
SPROCKET is particularly well suited for image searches within videos. For example, a user could edit three hours of video from their summer vacation in just a few seconds to only include a video that features a certain person.
The system is extremely efficient at moving tiny fractions of video between servers and making sure they’re processed right away.
It also makes sure that algorithms have enough context to process each specific video frame.
