Video2Flink: real-time video partitioning in Apache Flink and the cloud

Video2Flink is a distributed highly scalable video processing system for bounded (i.e., stored) or unbounded (i.e., continuous) and real-time video streams with the same efficiency. It shows how complicated video processing tasks can be expressed and executed as pipelined data flows on Apache Flink, an open-source stream processing platform. Video2Flink uses Apache Kafka to facilitate the machine-to-machine (m2m) communication between the video production and the video processing system that runs on Apache Flink. Features that make the combination of Apache Kafka and Apache Flink a desirable solution to the problem of video processing are the ease of customization, portability, scalability, and fault tolerance. The application is deployed on a Flink cluster of worker machines that run on Kubernetes in the Google Cloud Platform. The experimental results support our claims of speed showing excellent speed-up results for all tested video resolutions. The highest (i.e., more than seven times) speed-up was observed with the videos of the highest resolutions and in real time.