Edge-Assisted Real-Time Instance Segmentation for Resource-Limited IoT Devices

Instance segmentation exploits the potential of Internet of Things (IoT) devices to perceive environmental semantic information and achieve complex interactions with the physical world. However, IoT devices usually have limited computing and storage resources and cannot afford the intensive computational costs of instance segmentation networks. This article proposes an edge-assisted instance segmentation method for resource-limited IoT devices; it selectively offloads some computation-intensive tasks from IoT devices to edge servers to accelerate the inference processes of instance segmentation networks. To reduce the communication cost caused by computation offloading, a data compression method is proposed to adaptively adjust the downsampling interval based on an attention mechanism. Considering the susceptibility of the computation offloading scheme to network conditions, an adaptive computation offloading strategy that can jointly optimize the offloading point and the data compression ratio is proposed so that the edge-assisted instance segmentation can meet the preset latency requirements while achieving maximal accuracy under volatile network conditions. Extensive experiments are conducted to verify the feasibility and efficiency of our method. The experimental results show that our method induces less latency than existing instance segmentation methods with a slight drop in accuracy.