Datasets for AVC (H.264) and HEVC (H.265) evaluation of dynamic adaptive streaming over HTTP (DASH)

In this paper we present datasets for both trace-based simulation and real-time testbed evaluation of Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (DASH). Our trace-based simulation dataset provides a means of evaluation in frameworks such as NS-2 and NS-3, while our testbed evaluation dataset offers a means of analysing the delivery of content over a physical network and associated adaptation mechanisms at the client. Our datasets are available in both H.264 and H.265 with encoding rates comparative to the representations and resolutions of content distribution providers such as Netflix, Hulu and YouTube. The goal of our dataset is to provide researchers with a sufficiently large dataset, in both number, and duration, of clips which provides a comparison between both encoding schemes. We provide options for evaluating not only different content and genres, but also the underlying encoding metrics, such as transmission cost, segment distribution (the range of the oscillation of the segment sizes) and associated delivery issues such as jitter and re-buffering. Finally, we also offer our datasets in a header-only compressed format, which allows researchers to download the entire dataset and uncompress locally, thus ensuring that our datasets are accessible both online via remote and local servers

Video Compression and Optimization Technologies - Review

The use of video streaming is constantly increasing. High-resolution video requires resources on both the sender and the receiver side. There are many compression techniques that can be utilized to compress the video and simultaneously maintain quality. The main goal of this paper is to provide an overview of video streaming and QoE. This paper describes the basic concepts and discusses existing methodologies to measure QoE. Subjective, objective, and video compression technologies are discussed. This review paper gathers the codec implementation developed by MPEG, Google, and Apple. This paper outlines the challenges and future research directions that should be considered in the measurement and assessment of quality of experience for video services

Deep Video Precoding

Several groups worldwide are currently investigating how deep learning may advance the state-of-the-art in image and video coding. An open question is how to make deep neural networks work in conjunction with existing (and upcoming) video codecs, such as MPEG H.264/AVC, H.265/HEVC, VVC, Google VP9 and AOMedia AV1, AV2, as well as existing container and transport formats, without imposing any changes at the client side. Such compatibility is a crucial aspect when it comes to practical deployment, especially when considering the fact that the video content industry and hardware manufacturers are expected to remain committed to supporting these standards for the foreseeable future. We propose to use deep neural networks as precoders for current and future video codecs and adaptive video streaming systems. In our current design, the core precoding component comprises a cascaded structure of downscaling neural networks that operates during video encoding, prior to transmission. This is coupled with a precoding mode selection algorithm for each independently-decodable stream segment, which adjusts the downscaling factor according to scene characteristics, the utilized encoder, and the desired bitrate and encoding configuration. Our framework is compatible with all current and future codec and transport standards, as our deep precoding network structure is trained in conjunction with linear upscaling filters (e.g., the bilinear filter), which are supported by all web video players. Extensive evaluation on FHD (1080p) and UHD (2160p) content and with widely-used H.264/AVC, H.265/HEVC and VP9 encoders, as well as a preliminary evaluation with the current test model of VVC (v.6.2rc1), shows that coupling such standards with the proposed deep video precoding allows for 8% to 52% rate reduction under encoding configurations and bitrates suitable for video-on-demand adaptive streaming systems. The use of precoding can also lead to encoding complexity reduction, which is essential for cost-effective cloud deployment of complex encoders like H.265/HEVC, VP9 and VVC, especially when considering the prominence of high-resolution adaptive video streaming

A Survey on Energy Consumption and Environmental Impact of Video Streaming

Climate change challenges require a notable decrease in worldwide greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions across technology sectors. Digital technologies, especially video streaming, accounting for most Internet traffic, make no exception. Video streaming demand increases with remote working, multimedia communication services (e.g., WhatsApp, Skype), video streaming content (e.g., YouTube, Netflix), video resolution (4K/8K, 50 fps/60 fps), and multi-view video, making energy consumption and environmental footprint critical. This survey contributes to a better understanding of sustainable and efficient video streaming technologies by providing insights into the state-of-the-art and potential future directions for researchers, developers, and engineers, service providers, hosting platforms, and consumers. We widen this survey's focus on content provisioning and content consumption based on the observation that continuously active network equipment underneath video streaming consumes substantial energy independent of the transmitted data type. We propose a taxonomy of factors that affect the energy consumption in video streaming, such as encoding schemes, resource requirements, storage, content retrieval, decoding, and display. We identify notable weaknesses in video streaming that require further research for improved energy efficiency: (1) fixed bitrate ladders in HTTP live streaming; (2) inefficient hardware utilization of existing video players; (3) lack of comprehensive open energy measurement dataset covering various device types and coding parameters for reproducible research

DASHbed: a testbed framework for large scale empirical evaluation of real-time DASH in wireless scenarios

Recent years have witnessed an explosion of multimedia traffic carried over the Internet. Video-on-demand and live streaming services are the most dominant services. To ensure growth, many streaming providers have invested considerable time and effort to keep pace with ever-increasing users’ demand for better quality and stall abolition. HTTP adaptive streaming (HAS) algorithms are at the core of every major streaming provider service. Recent years have seen sustained development in HAS algorithms. Currently, to evaluate their proposed solutions, researchers need to create a framework and numerous state-of-the-art algorithms. Often, these frameworks lack flexibility and scalability, covering only a limited set of scenarios. To fill this gap, in this paper we propose DASHbed, a highly customizable real-time framework for testing HAS algorithms in a wireless environment. Due to its low memory requirement, DASHbed offers a means of running large-scale experiments with a hundred competing players. Finally, we supplement the proposed framework with a dataset consisting of results for five HAS algorithms tested in various evaluated scenarios. The dataset showcases the abilities of DASHbed and presents the adaptation metrics per segment in the generated content (such as switches, buffer-level, P.1203.1 values, delivery rate, stall duration, etc.), which can be used as a baseline when researchers compare the output of their proposed algorithm against the state-of-the-art algorithms

An objective and subjective quality assessment for passive gaming video streaming

Gaming video streaming has become increasingly popular in recent times. Along with the rise and popularity of cloud gaming services and e-sports, passive gaming video streaming services such as Twitch.tv, YouTubeGaming, etc. where viewers watch the gameplay of other gamers, have seen increasing acceptance. Twitch.tv alone has over 2.2 million monthly streamers and 15 million daily active users with almost a million average concurrent users, making Twitch.tv the 4th biggest internet traffic generator, just after Netflix, YouTube and Apple. Despite the increasing importance and popularity of such live gaming video streaming services, they have until recently not caught the attention of the quality assessment research community. For the continued success of such services, it is imperative to maintain and satisfy the end user Quality of Experience (QoE), which can be measured using various Video Quality Assessment (VQA) methods. Gaming videos are synthetic and artificial in nature and have different streaming requirements as compared to traditional non-gaming content. While there exist a lot of subjective and objective studies in the field of quality assessment of Video-on-demand (VOD) streaming services, such as Netflix and YouTube, along with the design of many VQA metrics, no work has been done previously towards quality assessment of live passive gaming video streaming applications. The research work in this thesis tries to address this gap by using various subjective and objective quality assessment studies. A codec comparison using the three most popular and widely used compression standards is performed to determine their compression efficiency. Furthermore, a subjective and objective comparative study is carried out to find out the difference between gaming and non-gaming videos in terms of the trade-off between quality and data-rate after compression. This is followed by the creation of an open source gaming video dataset, which is then used for a performance evaluation study of the eight most popular VQA metrics. Different temporal pooling strategies and content based classification approaches are evaluated to assess their effect on the VQA metrics. Finally, due to the low performance of existing No-Reference (NR) VQA metrics on gaming video content, two machine learning based NR models are designed using NR features and existing NR metrics, which are shown to outperform existing NR metrics while performing on par with state-of-the-art Full-Reference (FR) VQA metrics

A machine learning driven solution to the problem of perceptual video quality metrics

The advent of high-speed internet connections, advanced video coding algorithms, and consumer-grade computers with high computational capabilities has led videostreaming-over-the-internet to make up the majority of network traffic. This effect has led to a continuously expanding video streaming industry that seeks to offer enhanced quality-of-experience (QoE) to its users at the lowest cost possible. Video streaming services are now able to adapt to the hardware and network restrictions that each user faces and thus provide the best experience possible under those restrictions. The most common way to adapt to network bandwidth restrictions is to offer a video stream at the highest possible visual quality, for the maximum achievable bitrate under the network connection in use. This is achieved by storing various pre-encoded versions of the video content with different bitrate and visual quality settings. Visual quality is measured by means of objective quality metrics, such as the Mean Squared Error (MSE), Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR), Structural Similarity Index (SSIM), Visual Information Fidelity (VIF), and others, which can be easily computed analytically. Nevertheless, it is widely accepted that although these metrics provide an accurate estimate of the statistical quality degradation, they do not reflect the viewer’s perception of visual quality accurately. As a result, the acquisition of user ratings in the form of Mean Opinion Scores (MOS) remains the most accurate depiction of human-perceived video quality, albeit very costly and time consuming, and thus cannot be practically employed by video streaming providers that have hundreds or thousands of videos in their catalogues. A recent very promising approach for addressing this limitation is the use of machine learning techniques in order to train models that represent human video quality perception more accurately. To this end, regression techniques are used in order to map objective quality metrics to human video quality ratings, acquired for a large number of diverse video sequences. Results have been very promising, with approaches like the Video Multimethod Assessment Fusion (VMAF) metric achieving higher correlations to useracquired MOS ratings compared to traditional widely used objective quality metrics

Video-assisted Overtaking System enabled by V2V Communications

V2X (Vehicle-to-Everything) is a promising technology to diminish road hazards and increase driving safety. This thesis focuses in the transmission of video between vehicles (V2V, Vehicle-to-Vehicle) in an overtaking situation, helping drivers to be more aware and less error-prone in these situations. In the implementation, the vehicle reads from vehicle's CAN and GPS data to setup the system, streams his Line of Sight to the overtaking vehicle and uses DSRC as the communication technology

Packet loss visibility across SD, HD, 3D, and UHD video streams

The trend towards video streaming with increased spatial resolutions and dimensions, SD, HD, 3D, and 4kUHD, even for portable devices has important implications for displayed video quality. There is an interplay between packetization, packet loss visibility, choice of codec, and viewing conditions, which implies that prior studies at lower resolutions may not be as relevant. This paper presents two sets of experiments, the one at a Variable BitRate (VBR) and the other at a Constant BitRate (CBR), which highlight different aspects of the interpretation. The latter experiments also compare and contrast encoding with either an H.264 or an High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) codec, with all results recorded as objective Mean Opinion Score (MOS). The video quality assessments will be of interest to those considering: the bitrates and expected quality in error-prone environments; or, in fact, whether to use a reliable transport protocol to prevent all errors, at a cost in jitter and latency, rather than tolerate low levels of packet errors