Laxmi: A Novel AI Based System for Smart,Energy Efficient, and Secure Video Footage Processing

This paper presents LAXMI, a secure and light-weight edge–cloud hybrid video analytics pipeline for motion detection and real-time object classification. The end objective is to design a system that can perform computationally efficient scene analysis in the edge but securely transmit full video data to the cloud for archival or additional processing. The pipeline aims to minimize processing delay, minimize bandwidth usage, and guard surveillance content with a combination of optimized machine learning and cryptographic methods. The LAXMI system integrates a temporal gradient-based motion detection (TGMD) algorithm at the edge, which precisely identifies motion segments within continuous video streams. Upon detection of motion, the system conducts YOLOv8 object detection for classification and annotation of related entities such as people, cars, animals, and other moving objects. One of the key novelties is employing a hybrid tokenization strategy where the video is encrypted with AES-256 and the encryption key is securely transported using RSA public-key cryptography. This ensures data confidentiality as well as secure edge-to-cloud communications. The edge server then generates a JWT-based token for authenticating the cloud upload. Four-week-duration performance tests reveal that the edge-based motion detection subsystem achieved a 92.7\% accuracy and F1-score of 96.2\%, while the YOLOv8 classifier achieved 94.8\% accuracy and F1-score of 94.4\%. Further, the edge pipeline outperformed the cloud baseline across processing latency, energy expense, and bandwidth consumption constantly, thereby setting the effectiveness of the proposed LAXMI architecture in actual smart surveillance applications.