Objective assessment of region of interest-aware adaptive multimedia streaming quality

Adaptive multimedia streaming relies on controlled adjustment of content bitrate and consequent video quality variation in order to meet the bandwidth constraints of the communication link used for content delivery to the end-user. The values of the easy to measure network-related Quality of Service metrics have no direct relationship with the way moving images are perceived by the human viewer. Consequently variations in the video stream bitrate are not clearly linked to similar variation in the user perceived quality. This is especially true if some human visual system-based adaptation techniques are employed. As research has shown, there are certain image regions in each frame of a video sequence on which the users are more interested than in the others. This paper presents the Region of Interest-based Adaptive Scheme (ROIAS) which adjusts differently the regions within each frame of the streamed multimedia content based on the user interest in them. ROIAS is presented and discussed in terms of the adjustment algorithms employed and their impact on the human perceived video quality. Comparisons with existing approaches, including a constant quality adaptation scheme across the whole frame area, are performed employing two objective metrics which estimate user perceived video quality

Pilot Open Case Series of Voice over Internet Protocol-Delivered Assessment and Behavior Therapy for Chronic Tic Disorders

Comprehensive Behavioral Intervention for Tics (CBIT) is an efficacious treatment for children with chronic tic disorders (CTDs). Nevertheless, many families of children with CTDs are unable to access CBIT due to a lack of adequately trained treatment providers, time commitment, and travel distance. This study established the interrater reliability between in-person and Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) administrations of the Yale Global Tic Severity Scale (YGTSS), and examined the preliminary efficacy, feasibility, and acceptability of VoIP-delivered CBIT for reducing tics in children with CTDs in an open case series. Across in-person and VoIP administrations of the YGTSS, results showed mean agreement of 91%, 96%, and 95% for motor, phonic, and total tic severity subscales. In the pilot feasibility study, 4 children received 8 weekly sessions of CBIT via VoIP and were assessed at pre- and posttreatment by an independent evaluator. Results showed a 29.44% decrease in clinician-rated tic severity from pre- to posttreatment on the YGTSS. Two of the 4 patients were considered treatment responders at posttreatment, using Clinical Global Impressions–Improvement ratings. Therapeutic alliance, parent and child treatment satisfaction, and videoconferencing satisfaction ratings were high. CBIT was considered feasible to implement via VoIP, although further testing is recommended

Performance evaluation of MPEG-4 video streaming over UMTS networks using an integrated tool environment

Universal Mobile Telecommunications System (UMTS) is a third-generation mobile communications system that supports wireless wideband multimedia applications. This paper investigates the video quality attained in streaming MPEG-4 video over UMTS networks using an integrated tool environment, which comprises an MPEG-4 encoder/decoder, a network simulator and video quality evaluation tools. The benefit of such an integrated tool environment is that it allows the evaluation of real video sources compressed using an MPEG-4 encoder. Simulation results show that UMTS Radio Link Control (RLC) outperforms the unacknowledged mode. The latter mode provides timely delivery but no error recovery. The acknowledged mode can deliver excellent perceived video quality for RLC block error rates up to 30% utilizing a playback buffer at the streaming client. Based on the analysis of the performance results, a self-adaptive RLC acknowledged mode protocol is proposed

A Framework for Quality-Driven Delivery in Distributed Multimedia Systems

In this paper, we propose a framework for Quality-Driven Delivery (QDD) in distributed multimedia environments. Quality-driven delivery refers to the capacity of a system to deliver documents, or more generally objects, while considering the users expectations in terms of non-functional requirements. For this QDD framework, we propose a model-driven approach where we focus on QoS information modeling and transformation. QoS information models and meta-models are used during different QoS activities for mapping requirements to system constraints, for exchanging QoS information, for checking compatibility between QoS information and more generally for making QoS decisions. We also investigate which model transformation operators have to be implemented in order to support some QoS activities such as QoS mapping

The QUIC Fix for Optimal Video Streaming

Within a few years of its introduction, QUIC has gained traction: a significant chunk of traffic is now delivered over QUIC. The networking community is actively engaged in debating the fairness, performance, and applicability of QUIC for various use cases, but these debates are centered around a narrow, common theme: how does the new reliable transport built on top of UDP fare in different scenarios? Support for unreliable delivery in QUIC remains largely unexplored. The option for delivering content unreliably, as in a best-effort model, deserves the QUIC designers' and community's attention. We propose extending QUIC to support unreliable streams and present a simple approach for implementation. We discuss a simple use case of video streaming---an application that dominates the overall Internet traffic---that can leverage the unreliable streams and potentially bring immense benefits to network operators and content providers. To this end, we present a prototype implementation that, by using both the reliable and unreliable streams in QUIC, outperforms both TCP and QUIC in our evaluations.Comment: Published to ACM CoNEXT Workshop on the Evolution, Performance, and Interoperability of QUIC (EPIQ

Telehealth for expanding the reach of early autism training to parents.

Although there is consensus that parents should be involved in interventions designed for young children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), parent participation alone does not ensure consistent, generalized gains in children's development. Barriers such as costly intervention, time-intensive sessions, and family life may prevent parents from using the intervention at home. Telehealth integrates communication technologies to provide health-related services at a distance. A 12 one-hour per week parent intervention program was tested using telehealth delivery with nine families with ASD. The goal was to examine its feasibility and acceptance for promoting child learning throughout families' daily play and caretaking interactions at home. Parents became skilled at using teachable moments to promote children's spontaneous language and imitation skills and were pleased with the support and ease of telehealth learning. Preliminary results suggest the potential of technology for helping parents understand and use early intervention practices more often in their daily interactions with children

Optimized Adaptive Streaming Representations based on System Dynamics

Adaptive streaming addresses the increasing and heterogenous demand of multimedia content over the Internet by offering several encoded versions for each video sequence. Each version (or representation) has a different resolution and bit rate, aimed at a specific set of users, like TV or mobile phone clients. While most existing works on adaptive streaming deal with effective playout-control strategies at the client side, we take in this paper a providers' perspective and propose solutions to improve user satisfaction by optimizing the encoding rates of the video sequences. We formulate an integer linear program that maximizes users' average satisfaction, taking into account the network dynamics, the video content information, and the user population characteristics. The solution of the optimization is a set of encoding parameters that permit to create different streams to robustly satisfy users' requests over time. We simulate multiple adaptive streaming sessions characterized by realistic network connections models, where the proposed solution outperforms commonly used vendor recommendations, in terms of user satisfaction but also in terms of fairness and outage probability. The simulation results further show that video content information as well as network constraints and users' statistics play a crucial role in selecting proper encoding parameters to provide fairness a mong users and to reduce network resource usage. We finally propose a few practical guidelines that can be used to choose the encoding parameters based on the user base characteristics, the network capacity and the type of video content