Multimedia delivery in the future internet

The term “Networked Media” implies that all kinds of media including text, image, 3D graphics, audio and video are produced, distributed, shared, managed and consumed on-line through various networks, like the Internet, Fiber, WiFi, WiMAX, GPRS, 3G and so on, in a convergent manner [1]. This white paper is the contribution of the Media Delivery Platform (MDP) cluster and aims to cover the Networked challenges of the Networked Media in the transition to the Future of the Internet. Internet has evolved and changed the way we work and live. End users of the Internet have been confronted with a bewildering range of media, services and applications and of technological innovations concerning media formats, wireless networks, terminal types and capabilities. And there is little evidence that the pace of this innovation is slowing. Today, over one billion of users access the Internet on regular basis, more than 100 million users have downloaded at least one (multi)media file and over 47 millions of them do so regularly, searching in more than 160 Exabytes1 of content. In the near future these numbers are expected to exponentially rise. It is expected that the Internet content will be increased by at least a factor of 6, rising to more than 990 Exabytes before 2012, fuelled mainly by the users themselves. Moreover, it is envisaged that in a near- to mid-term future, the Internet will provide the means to share and distribute (new) multimedia content and services with superior quality and striking flexibility, in a trusted and personalized way, improving citizens’ quality of life, working conditions, edutainment and safety. In this evolving environment, new transport protocols, new multimedia encoding schemes, cross-layer inthe network adaptation, machine-to-machine communication (including RFIDs), rich 3D content as well as community networks and the use of peer-to-peer (P2P) overlays are expected to generate new models of interaction and cooperation, and be able to support enhanced perceived quality-of-experience (PQoE) and innovative applications “on the move”, like virtual collaboration environments, personalised services/ media, virtual sport groups, on-line gaming, edutainment. In this context, the interaction with content combined with interactive/multimedia search capabilities across distributed repositories, opportunistic P2P networks and the dynamic adaptation to the characteristics of diverse mobile terminals are expected to contribute towards such a vision. Based on work that has taken place in a number of EC co-funded projects, in Framework Program 6 (FP6) and Framework Program 7 (FP7), a group of experts and technology visionaries have voluntarily contributed in this white paper aiming to describe the status, the state-of-the art, the challenges and the way ahead in the area of Content Aware media delivery platforms

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

3D video coding and transmission

The capture, transmission, and display of 3D content has gained a lot of attention in the last few years. 3D multimedia content is no longer con fined to cinema theatres but is being transmitted using stereoscopic video over satellite, shared on Blu-RayTMdisks, or sent over Internet technologies. Stereoscopic displays are needed at the receiving end and the viewer needs to wear special glasses to present the two versions of the video to the human vision system that then generates the 3D illusion. To be more e ffective and improve the immersive experience, more views are acquired from a larger number of cameras and presented on di fferent displays, such as autostereoscopic and light field displays. These multiple views, combined with depth data, also allow enhanced user experiences and new forms of interaction with the 3D content from virtual viewpoints. This type of audiovisual information is represented by a huge amount of data that needs to be compressed and transmitted over bandwidth-limited channels. Part of the COST Action IC1105 \3D Content Creation, Coding and Transmission over Future Media Networks" (3DConTourNet) focuses on this research challenge.peer-reviewe

Beyond multimedia adaptation: Quality of experience-aware multi-sensorial media delivery

Multiple sensorial media (mulsemedia) combines multiple media elements which engage three or more of human senses, and as most other media content, requires support for delivery over the existing networks. This paper proposes an adaptive mulsemedia framework (ADAMS) for delivering scalable video and sensorial data to users. Unlike existing two-dimensional joint source-channel adaptation solutions for video streaming, the ADAMS framework includes three joint adaptation dimensions: video source, sensorial source, and network optimization. Using an MPEG-7 description scheme, ADAMS recommends the integration of multiple sensorial effects (i.e., haptic, olfaction, air motion, etc.) as metadata into multimedia streams. ADAMS design includes both coarse- and fine-grained adaptation modules on the server side: mulsemedia flow adaptation and packet priority scheduling. Feedback from subjective quality evaluation and network conditions is used to develop the two modules. Subjective evaluation investigated users' enjoyment levels when exposed to mulsemedia and multimedia sequences, respectively and to study users' preference levels of some sensorial effects in the context of mulsemedia sequences with video components at different quality levels. Results of the subjective study inform guidelines for an adaptive strategy that selects the optimal combination for video segments and sensorial data for a given bandwidth constraint and user requirement. User perceptual tests show how ADAMS outperforms existing multimedia delivery solutions in terms of both user perceived quality and user enjoyment during adaptive streaming of various mulsemedia content. In doing so, it highlights the case for tailored, adaptive mulsemedia delivery over traditional multimedia adaptive transport mechanisms

Understanding user experience of mobile video: Framework, measurement, and optimization

Since users have become the focus of product/service design in last decade, the term User eXperience (UX) has been frequently used in the field of Human-Computer-Interaction (HCI). Research on UX facilitates a better understanding of the various aspects of the user’s interaction with the product or service. Mobile video, as a new and promising service and research field, has attracted great attention. Due to the significance of UX in the success of mobile video (Jordan, 2002), many researchers have centered on this area, examining users’ expectations, motivations, requirements, and usage context. As a result, many influencing factors have been explored (Buchinger, Kriglstein, Brandt & Hlavacs, 2011; Buchinger, Kriglstein & Hlavacs, 2009). However, a general framework for specific mobile video service is lacking for structuring such a great number of factors. To measure user experience of multimedia services such as mobile video, quality of experience (QoE) has recently become a prominent concept. In contrast to the traditionally used concept quality of service (QoS), QoE not only involves objectively measuring the delivered service but also takes into account user’s needs and desires when using the service, emphasizing the user’s overall acceptability on the service. Many QoE metrics are able to estimate the user perceived quality or acceptability of mobile video, but may be not enough accurate for the overall UX prediction due to the complexity of UX. Only a few frameworks of QoE have addressed more aspects of UX for mobile multimedia applications but need be transformed into practical measures. The challenge of optimizing UX remains adaptations to the resource constrains (e.g., network conditions, mobile device capabilities, and heterogeneous usage contexts) as well as meeting complicated user requirements (e.g., usage purposes and personal preferences). In this chapter, we investigate the existing important UX frameworks, compare their similarities and discuss some important features that fit in the mobile video service. Based on the previous research, we propose a simple UX framework for mobile video application by mapping a variety of influencing factors of UX upon a typical mobile video delivery system. Each component and its factors are explored with comprehensive literature reviews. The proposed framework may benefit in user-centred design of mobile video through taking a complete consideration of UX influences and in improvement of mobile videoservice quality by adjusting the values of certain factors to produce a positive user experience. It may also facilitate relative research in the way of locating important issues to study, clarifying research scopes, and setting up proper study procedures. We then review a great deal of research on UX measurement, including QoE metrics and QoE frameworks of mobile multimedia. Finally, we discuss how to achieve an optimal quality of user experience by focusing on the issues of various aspects of UX of mobile video. In the conclusion, we suggest some open issues for future study

Scalable and network aware video coding for advanced communications over heterogeneous networks

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and was awarded by Brunel UniversityThis work addresses the issues concerned with the provision of scalable video services over heterogeneous networks particularly with regards to dynamic adaptation and user’s acceptable quality of service. In order to provide and sustain an adaptive and network friendly multimedia communication service, a suite of techniques that achieved automatic scalability and adaptation are developed. These techniques are evaluated objectively and subjectively to assess the Quality of Service (QoS) provided to diverse users with variable constraints and dynamic resources. The research ensured the consideration of various levels of user acceptable QoS The techniques are further evaluated with view to establish their performance against state of the art scalable and non-scalable techniques. To further improve the adaptability of the designed techniques, several experiments and real time simulations are conducted with the aim of determining the optimum performance with various coding parameters and scenarios. The coding parameters and scenarios are evaluated and analyzed to determine their performance using various types of video content and formats. Several algorithms are developed to provide a dynamic adaptation of coding tools and parameters to specific video content type, format and bandwidth of transmission. Due to the nature of heterogeneous networks where channel conditions, terminals, users capabilities and preferences etc are unpredictably changing, hence limiting the adaptability of a specific technique adopted, a Dynamic Scalability Decision Making Algorithm (SADMA) is developed. The algorithm autonomously selects one of the designed scalability techniques basing its decision on the monitored and reported channel conditions. Experiments were conducted using a purpose-built heterogeneous network simulator and the network-aware selection of the scalability techniques is based on real time simulation results. A technique with a minimum delay, low bit-rate, low frame rate and low quality is adopted as a reactive measure to a predicted bad channel condition. If the use of the techniques is not favoured due to deteriorating channel conditions reported, a reduced layered stream or base layer is used. If the network status does not allow the use of the base layer, then the stream uses parameter identifiers with high efficiency to improve the scalability and adaptation of the video service. To further improve the flexibility and efficiency of the algorithm, a dynamic de-blocking filter and lambda value selection are analyzed and introduced in the algorithm. Various methods, interfaces and algorithms are defined for transcoding from one technique to another and extracting sub-streams when the network conditions do not allow for the transmission of the entire bit-stream

Design and evaluation of novel scalability techniques for adaptation over heterogeneous networks

This paper addresses the issues concerned with the provision of scalable video services over heterogeneous networks particularly with regards to dynamic adaptation and user’s acceptable quality of service. In order to provide and sustain an adaptive and network friendly multimedia communication service, a suite of techniques that achieved automatic scalability and adaptation are developed using H.264/AVC Extension codec platform. The objective, subjective and real time performances of the techniques are evaluated to assess the Quality of Service (QoS) provided to diverse users with variable constraints and dynamic resources. The techniques are further evaluated with view to establish their performance against state of the art scalable and none-scalable techniques. Several experiments and simulations revealed that the proposed techniques outperformed state-of- the-art and none-scalable(SL) techniques. The designed techniques provide an automated scalability adaptation on the video stream and showed up to 50% gain in scalability adaptation against single layer (SL) and none-combined scalability techniques

Architectural support for ubiquitous access to multimedia content

Tese de doutoramento. Engenharia Electrotécnica e de Computadores (Telecomunicações). Faculdade de Engenharia. Universidade do Porto. 200