Graded quantization for multiple description coding of compressive measurements

Compressed sensing (CS) is an emerging paradigm for acquisition of compressed representations of a sparse signal. Its low complexity is appealing for resource-constrained scenarios like sensor networks. However, such scenarios are often coupled with unreliable communication channels and providing robust transmission of the acquired data to a receiver is an issue. Multiple description coding (MDC) effectively combats channel losses for systems without feedback, thus raising the interest in developing MDC methods explicitly designed for the CS framework, and exploiting its properties. We propose a method called Graded Quantization (CS-GQ) that leverages the democratic property of compressive measurements to effectively implement MDC, and we provide methods to optimize its performance. A novel decoding algorithm based on the alternating directions method of multipliers is derived to reconstruct signals from a limited number of received descriptions. Simulations are performed to assess the performance of CS-GQ against other methods in presence of packet losses. The proposed method is successful at providing robust coding of CS measurements and outperforms other schemes for the considered test metrics

Robust P2P Live Streaming

Projecte fet en col.laboració amb la Fundació i2CATThe provisioning of robust real-time communication services (voice, video, etc.) or media contents through the Internet in a distributed manner is an important challenge, which will strongly influence in current and future Internet evolution. Aware of this, we are developing a project named Trilogy leaded by the i2CAT Foundation, which has as main pillar the study, development and evaluation of Peer-to-Peer (P2P) Live streaming architectures for the distribution of high-quality media contents. In this context, this work concretely covers media coding aspects and proposes the use of Multiple Description Coding (MDC) as a flexible solution for providing robust and scalable live streaming over P2P networks. This work describes current state of the art in media coding techniques and P2P streaming architectures, presents the implemented prototype as well as its simulation and validation results

Energy Consumption Of Visual Sensor Networks: Impact Of Spatio-Temporal Coverage

Wireless visual sensor networks (VSNs) are expected to play a major role in future IEEE 802.15.4 personal area networks (PAN) under recently-established collision-free medium access control (MAC) protocols, such as the IEEE 802.15.4e-2012 MAC. In such environments, the VSN energy consumption is affected by the number of camera sensors deployed (spatial coverage), as well as the number of captured video frames out of which each node processes and transmits data (temporal coverage). In this paper, we explore this aspect for uniformly-formed VSNs, i.e., networks comprising identical wireless visual sensor nodes connected to a collection node via a balanced cluster-tree topology, with each node producing independent identically-distributed bitstream sizes after processing the video frames captured within each network activation interval. We derive analytic results for the energy-optimal spatio-temporal coverage parameters of such VSNs under a-priori known bounds for the number of frames to process per sensor and the number of nodes to deploy within each tier of the VSN. Our results are parametric to the probability density function characterizing the bitstream size produced by each node and the energy consumption rates of the system of interest. Experimental results reveal that our analytic results are always within 7% of the energy consumption measurements for a wide range of settings. In addition, results obtained via a multimedia subsystem show that the optimal spatio-temporal settings derived by the proposed framework allow for substantial reduction of energy consumption in comparison to ad-hoc settings. As such, our analytic modeling is useful for early-stage studies of possible VSN deployments under collision-free MAC protocols prior to costly and time-consuming experiments in the field.Comment: to appear in IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology, 201

Multiple-Tree Push-based Overlay Streaming

Multiple-Tree Overlay Streaming has attracted a great amount of attention from researchers in the past years. Multiple-tree streaming is a promising alternative to single-tree streaming in terms of node dynamics and load balancing, among others, which in turn addresses the perceived video quality by the streaming user on node dynamics or when heterogeneous nodes join the network. This article presents a comprehensive survey of the different aproaches and techniques used in this research area. In this paper we identify node-disjointness as the property most approaches aim to achieve. We also present an alternative technique which does not try to achieve this but does local optimizations aiming global optimizations. Thus, we identify this property as not being absolute necessary for creating robust and heterogeneous multi-tree overlays. We identify two main design goals: robustness and support for heterogeneity, and classify existing approaches into these categories as their main focus