Scalable Multimedia Content Analysis on Parallel Platforms Using Python

TitleScalable Multimedia Content Analysis on Parallel Platforms Using Python
Publication TypeJournal Article
Year of Publication2014
AuthorsGonina, E., Friedland G., Battenberg E., Koanantakool P., Driscoll M., Georganas E., & Keutzer K.
Published inACM Transactions on Multimedia Computing
Volume10
Issue2
Other Numbers3628
Abstract

In this new era dominated by consumer-produced media there is a high demand for web-scalable solutions to multimedia content analysis. A compelling approach to making applications scalable is to explicitly map their computation onto parallel platforms. However, developing efficient parallel implementations and fully utilizing the available resources remains a challenge due to the increased code complexity, limited portability and required low-level knowledge of the underlying hardware. In this article, we present PyCASP, a Python-based framework that automatically maps computation onto parallel platforms from Python application code to a variety of parallel platforms. PyCASP is designed using a systematic, pattern-oriented approach to offer a single software development environment for multimedia content analysis applications. Using PyCASP, applications can be prototyped in a couple hundred lines of Python code and automatically scale to modern parallel processors. Applications written with PyCASP are portable to a variety of parallel platforms and efficiently scale from a single desktop Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) to an entire cluster with a small change to application code. To illustrate our approach, we present three multimedia content analysis applications that use our framework: a state-of-the-art speaker diarization application, a content-based music recommendation system based on the Million Song Dataset, and a video event detection system for consumer-produced videos. We show that across this wide range of applications, our approach achieves the goal of automatic portability and scalability while at the same time allowing easy prototyping in a high-level language and efficient performance of low-level optimized code.

Acknowledgment

This research was supported by Microsoft (Award #024263) and Intel (Award #024894) funding and by matching funding by U.C. Discovery (Award #DIG07-10227). Additional support comes from Par Lab affiliates National Instruments, Nokia, NVIDIA, Oracle, and Samsung. It was also partially supported by the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) via Department of Interior National Business Center contract number D11PC20066. The U.S. Government is authorized to reproduce and distribute reprints for Governmental purposes notwithstanding any copyright annotation thereon. The views and conclusion contained herein are those of the authors and should not be interpreted as necessarily representing the official policies or endorsement, either expressed or implied, of IARPA, DOI/NBC, or the U.S. Government.

URLhttps://www.icsi.berkeley.edu/pubs/multimedia/scalablemultimedia14.pdf
Bibliographic Notes

ACM Transactions on Multimedia Computing, Communications, and Applications (TOMCCAP), Vol. 10, Issue 2, article 18

Abbreviated Authors

E. Gonina, G. Friedland, E. Battenberg, P. Koanantakool, M. Driscoll, E. Georganas, and K. Keutzer

ICSI Research Group

Speech

ICSI Publication Type

Article in journal or magazine