Semantic multimedia remote display for mobile thin clients

Current remote display technologies for mobile thin clients convert practically all types of graphical content into sequences of images rendered by the client. Consequently, important information concerning the content semantics is lost. The present paper goes beyond this bottleneck by developing a semantic multimedia remote display. The principle consists of representing the graphical content as a real-time interactive multimedia scene graph. The underlying architecture features novel components for scene-graph creation and management, as well as for user interactivity handling. The experimental setup considers the Linux X windows system and BiFS/LASeR multimedia scene technologies on the server and client sides, respectively. The implemented solution was benchmarked against currently deployed solutions (VNC and Microsoft-RDP), by considering text editing and WWW browsing applications. The quantitative assessments demonstrate: (1) visual quality expressed by seven objective metrics, e.g., PSNR values between 30 and 42 dB or SSIM values larger than 0.9999; (2) downlink bandwidth gain factors ranging from 2 to 60; (3) real-time user event management expressed by network round-trip time reduction by factors of 4-6 and by uplink bandwidth gain factors from 3 to 10; (4) feasible CPU activity, larger than in the RDP case but reduced by a factor of 1.5 with respect to the VNC-HEXTILE

Analyzing Voice And Video Call Service Performance Over A Local Area Network

Tez (Yüksek Lisans) -- İstanbul Teknik Üniversitesi, Fen Bilimleri Enstitüsü, 2010Thesis (M.Sc.) -- İstanbul Technical University, Institute of Science and Technology, 2010Bu çalışmada, VOIP teknolojisinden ve bu teknolojiyi kablolu ve kablosuz ortamda gerçeklemenin en önemli darboğazları anlatılacaktır. Ayrıca H.323, SIP (Session Initiation Protocol), Megaco ve MGCP gibi yaygın olarak kullanılan ses iletim protokolleri ve H.261, H.263 ve H.264 gibi görüntü iletim protokollerinden bahsedilmiştir. Ses kodek seçimi ve VOIP servis kalitesine etki eden faktörleri anlatılmaktadır. Bu tezde, ses, görüntü ve veri iletişimini aynı anda bünyesinde barındıran gerçek şebekeler simüle edilecektir. Kullanıcılara rastlantısal olarak ses, görüntü ve FTP gibi birtakım uygulamalar atanmıştır. Ayrıca önerilen kablolu şebekeye, kablosuz bir şebeke ilave edilerek sonuçlar incelenecektir. Optimal servis kalitesini sağlamak için seçilen uygun kuyruklama mekanizmaları ve kodek seçimlerini içeren senaryolar incelenecek ve OPNET ile elde edilmiş simülasyon sonuçları tartışılacaktır.In this study, we present a detailed description of the VoIP and also the most common challenges of implementing voice communication into wireline or wireless networks are discussed. Common voice protocols, such as H.323, Session Initiation Protocol (SIP), Megaco, MGCP and video protocols such as H.261, H.263, H.264 are described as well. CODEC selection and factors affecting VoIP Quality of Service are analyzed. We simulate a real network which includes both voice, video and data communication simultaneously. Workstations are randomly assigned to different applications, such as voice, video and FTP. We will also implement a wireless network to our proposed system. The scenarios including selecting appropriate queuing scheme and codec selection are presented and the simulation results with OPNET are drawn.Yüksek LisansM.Sc

Graph Spectral Image Processing

Recent advent of graph signal processing (GSP) has spurred intensive studies of signals that live naturally on irregular data kernels described by graphs (e.g., social networks, wireless sensor networks). Though a digital image contains pixels that reside on a regularly sampled 2D grid, if one can design an appropriate underlying graph connecting pixels with weights that reflect the image structure, then one can interpret the image (or image patch) as a signal on a graph, and apply GSP tools for processing and analysis of the signal in graph spectral domain. In this article, we overview recent graph spectral techniques in GSP specifically for image / video processing. The topics covered include image compression, image restoration, image filtering and image segmentation

LTE Optimization and Resource Management in Wireless Heterogeneous Networks

Mobile communication technology is evolving with a great pace. The development of the Long Term Evolution (LTE) mobile system by 3GPP is one of the milestones in this direction. This work highlights a few areas in the LTE radio access network where the proposed innovative mechanisms can substantially improve overall LTE system performance. In order to further extend the capacity of LTE networks, an integration with the non-3GPP networks (e.g., WLAN, WiMAX etc.) is also proposed in this work. Moreover, it is discussed how bandwidth resources should be managed in such heterogeneous networks. The work has purposed a comprehensive system architecture as an overlay of the 3GPP defined SAE architecture, effective resource management mechanisms as well as a Linear Programming based analytical solution for the optimal network resource allocation problem. In addition, alternative computationally efficient heuristic based algorithms have also been designed to achieve near-optimal performance

Multimedia in mobile networks: Streaming techniques, optimization and User Experience

1.UMTS overview and User Experience 2.Streaming Service & Streaming Platform 3.Quality of Service 4.Mpeg-4 5.Test Methodology & testing architecture 6.Conclusion

Advanced Free Viewpoint Video Streaming Techniques

Free-viewpoint video is a new type of interactive multimedia service allowing users to control their viewpoint and generate new views of a dynamic scene from any perspective. The uniquely generated and displayed views are composed from two or more high bitrate camera streams that must be delivered to the users depending on their continuously changing perspective. Due to significant network and computational resource requirements, we proposed scalable viewpoint generation and delivery schemes based on multicast forwarding and distributed approach. Our aim was to find the optimal deployment locations of the distributed viewpoint synthesis processes in the network topology by allowing network nodes to act as proxy servers with caching and viewpoint synthesis functionalities. Moreover, a predictive multicast group management scheme was introduced in order to provide all camera views that may be requested in the near future and prevent the viewpoint synthesizer algorithm from remaining without camera streams. The obtained results showed that even 42% traffic decrease can be realized using distributed viewpoint synthesis and the probability of viewpoint synthesis starvation can be also significantly reduced in future free viewpoint video services

On the Effectiveness of Video Recolouring as an Uplink-model Video Coding Technique

For decades, conventional video compression formats have advanced via incremental improvements with each subsequent standard achieving better rate-distortion (RD) efficiency at the cost of increased encoder complexity compared to its predecessors. Design efforts have been driven by common multi-media use cases such as video-on-demand, teleconferencing, and video streaming, where the most important requirements are low bandwidth and low video playback latency. Meeting these requirements involves the use of computa- tionally expensive block-matching algorithms which produce excellent compression rates and quick decoding times. However, emerging use cases such as Wireless Video Sensor Networks, remote surveillance, and mobile video present new technical challenges in video compression. In these scenarios, the video capture and encoding devices are often power-constrained and have limited computational resources available, while the decoder devices have abundant resources and access to a dedicated power source. To address these use cases, codecs must be power-aware and offer a reasonable trade-off between video quality, bitrate, and encoder complexity. Balancing these constraints requires a complete rethinking of video compression technology. The uplink video-coding model represents a new paradigm to address these low-power use cases, providing the ability to redistribute computational complexity by offloading the motion estimation and compensation steps from encoder to decoder. Distributed Video Coding (DVC) follows this uplink model of video codec design, and maintains high quality video reconstruction through innovative channel coding techniques. The field of DVC is still early in its development, with many open problems waiting to be solved, and no defined video compression or distribution standards. Due to the experimental nature of the field, most DVC codec to date have focused on encoding and decoding the Luma plane only, which produce grayscale reconstructed videos. In this thesis, a technique called “video recolouring” is examined as an alternative to DVC. Video recolour- ing exploits the temporal redundancies between colour planes, reducing video bitrate by removing Chroma information from specific frames and then recolouring them at the decoder. A novel video recolouring algorithm called Motion-Compensated Recolouring (MCR) is proposed, which uses block motion estimation and bi-directional weighted motion-compensation to reconstruct Chroma planes at the decoder. MCR is used to enhance a conventional base-layer codec, and shown to reduce bitrate by up to 16% with only a slight decrease in objective quality. MCR also outperforms other video recolouring algorithms in terms of objective video quality, demonstrating up to 2 dB PSNR improvement in some cases

Apport de la Qualité de l’Expérience dans l’optimisation de services multimédia : application à la diffusion de la vidéo et à la VoIP

The emerging and fast growth of multimedia services have created new challenges for network service providers in order to guarantee the best user's Quality of Experience (QoE) in diverse networks with distinctive access technologies. Usually, various methods and techniques are used to predict the user satisfaction level by studying the combined impact of numerous factors. In this thesis, we consider two important multimedia services to evaluate the user perception, which are: video streaming service, and VoIP. This study investigates user's QoE that follows three directions: (1) methodologies for subjective QoE assessment of video services, (2) regulating user's QoE using video a rate adaptive algorithm, and (3) QoE-based power efficient resource allocation methods for Long Term Evaluation-Advanced (LTE-A) for VoIP. Initially, we describe two subjective methods to collect the dataset for assessing the user's QoE. The subjectively collected dataset is used to investigate the influence of different parameters (e.g. QoS, video types, user profile, etc.) on user satisfaction while using the video services. Later, we propose a client-based HTTP rate adaptive video streaming algorithm over TCP protocol to regulate the user's QoE. The proposed method considers three Quality of Service (QoS) parameters that govern the user perception, which are: Bandwidth, Buffer, and dropped Frame rate (BBF). The BBF method dynamically selects the suitable video quality according to network conditions and user's device properties. Lastly, we propose a QoE driven downlink scheduling method, i.e. QoE Power Escient Method (QEPEM) for LTE-A. It esciently allocates the radio resources, and optimizes the use of User Equipment (UE) power utilizing the Discontinuous Reception (DRX) method in LTE-AL'émergence et la croissance rapide des services multimédia dans les réseaux IP ont créé de nouveaux défis pour les fournisseurs de services réseau, qui, au-delà de la Qualité de Service (QoS) issue des paramètres techniques de leur réseau, doivent aussi garantir la meilleure qualité de perception utilisateur (Quality of Experience, QoE) dans des réseaux variés avec différentes technologies d'accès. Habituellement, différentes méthodes et techniques sont utilisées pour prédire le niveau de satisfaction de l'utilisateur, en analysant l'effet combiné de multiples facteurs. Dans cette thèse, nous nous intéressons à la commande du réseau en intégrant à la fois des aspects qualitatifs (perception du niveau de satisfaction de l'usager) et quantitatifs (mesure de paramètres réseau) dans l'objectif de développer des mécanismes capables, à la fois, de s'adapter à la variabilité des mesures collectées et d'améliorer la qualité de perception. Pour ce faire, nous avons étudié le cas de deux services multimédia populaires, qui sont : le streaming vidéo, et la voix sur IP (VoIP). Nous investiguons la QoE utilisateur de ces services selon trois aspects : (1) les méthodologies d'évaluation subjective de la QoE, dans le cadre d'un service vidéo, (2) les techniques d'adaptation de flux vidéo pour garantir un certain niveau de QoE, et (3) les méthodes d'allocation de ressource, tenant compte de la QoE tout en économisant l'énergie, dans le cadre d'un service de VoIP (LTE-A). Nous présentons d'abord deux méthodes pour récolter des jeux de données relatifs à la QoE. Nous utilisons ensuite ces jeux de données (issus des campagnes d'évaluation subjective que nous avons menées) pour comprendre l'influence de différents paramètres (réseau, terminal, profil utilisateur) sur la perception d'un utilisateur d'un service vidéo. Nous proposons ensuite un algorithme de streaming vidéo adaptatif, implémenté dans un client HTTP, et dont le but est d'assurer un certain niveau de QoE et le comparons à l'état de l'art. Notre algorithme tient compte de trois paramètres de QoS (bande passante, taille de mémoires tampons de réception et taux de pertes de paquets) et sélectionne dynamiquement la qualité vidéo appropriée en fonction des conditions du réseau et des propriétés du terminal de l'utilisateur. Enfin, nous proposons QEPEM (QoE Power Efficient Method), un algorithme d'ordonnancement basé sur la QoE, dans le cadre d'un réseau sans fil LTE, en nous intéressant à une allocation dynamique des ressources radio en tenant compte de la consommation énergétiqu

Computer Science's Digest Volume 2

This series of textbooks was created for the students of the Systems Engineering Program at the University of Nariño. They have been intentionally written in English to promote reading in a foreign language. The textbooks are a collection of reflections and workshops on specific situations in the field of computer science, based on the authors’ experiences. The main purpose of these textbooks is essentially academic. The way in which the reflections and workshops were constructed follows a didactic structure, to facilitate teaching and learning, making use of English as a second language. This book covers Internet and Multimedia Technology, System Analysis and Design, and Software Engineerin