Lightweight Spatiotemporal Feature Compression for Edge-Based Video Intelligence

The proliferation of video-capable edge devices has created an urgent demand for intelligent video analytics that operate within severe constraints of bandwidth, energy, and computational capacity. While deep neural networks have achieved remarkable accuracy in tasks such as object detection and activity recognition, their deployment on resource-limited edge platforms remains challenged by the high dimensionality of video data. This paper introduces a framework for lightweight spatiotemporal feature compression specifically designed to enable efficient edge-based video intelligence. We argue that compression must be understood not merely as a data reduction technique but as a structural intervention that shapes the entire inference pipeline, from sensor sampling to model architecture and communication protocol. The proposed approach decouples spatial and temporal redundancy through a dual-stream encoding strategy that preserves salient motion patterns while aggressively compressing static background information. We examine the architectural trade-offs between compression ratio, latency, and inference fidelity, and discuss how such compression influences system-level properties including energy sustainability, operational robustness under network variability, and fairness across diverse deployment contexts. A governance perspective is introduced to address the policy implications of automated video analysis at the edge, particularly concerning privacy preservation and algorithmic accountability. Through a comparative analysis with existing compression methods, we demonstrate that lightweight spatiotemporal compression can reduce data transmission requirements by over an order of magnitude while maintaining competitive accuracy on standard surveillance and activity recognition benchmarks. The paper concludes by outlining future research directions for adaptive compression policies that respond to real-time context, workload heterogeneity, and evolving ethical standards in edge video intelligence.