Edge4Real: A cost-effective edge computing based human behaviour recognition system for human-centric software engineering

Recognition of human behaviours including body motions and facial expressions plays a significant role in human-centric software engineering. However, due to the data and computation intensive nature of human behaviour recognition through video analytics, expensive powerful machines are often required, which could hinder the research and application in human-centric software engineering. To address such an issue, this paper proposes a cost-effective human behaviour recognition system named Edge4Real which can be easily deployed in an edge computing environment with commodity machines. Compared with existing centralised solutions, Edge4Real has three major advantages including cost-effectiveness, easy-to-use, and realtime. Specifically, Edge4Real adopts a distributed architecture where components such as motion capturing, human behaviour recognition, data decoding and extraction, and the application of the recognition result, can be deployed on separated end devices and edge nodes in an edge computing environment. Using a virtual reality application which can capture a user's motion and translate into the motion of a 3D avatar in real time, we successfully validate the effectiveness of the system and demonstrate its promising value to the research and application of human-centric software engineering. The demo video can be found at https://youtu.be/tnEshD8j-kA.