  Connected societies require reliable measures to assure the safety, privacy,
and security of members. Public safety technology has made fundamental
improvements since the first generation of surveillance cameras were
introduced, which aims to reduce the role of observer agents so that no
abnormality goes unnoticed. While the edge computing paradigm promises
solutions to address the shortcomings of cloud computing, e.g., the extra
communication delay and network security issues, it also introduces new
challenges. One of the main concerns is the limited computing power at the edge
to meet the on-site dynamic data processing. In this paper, a Lightweight IoT
(Internet of Things) based Smart Public Safety (LISPS) framework is proposed on
top of microservices architecture. As a computing hierarchy at the edge, the
LISPS system possesses high flexibility in the design process, loose coupling
to add new services or update existing functions without interrupting the
normal operations, and efficient power balancing. A real-world public safety
monitoring scenario is selected to verify the effectiveness of LISPS, which
detects, tracks human objects and identify suspicious activities. The
experimental results demonstrate the feasibility of the approach.
