Improving perceptual multimedia quality with an adaptable communication protocol

Copyrights @ 2005 University Computing Centre ZagrebInnovations and developments in networking technology have been driven by technical considerations with little analysis of the benefit to the user. In this paper we argue that network parameters that define the network Quality of Service (QoS) must be driven by user-centric parameters such as user expectations and requirements for multimedia transmitted over a network. To this end a mechanism for mapping user-oriented parameters to network QoS parameters is outlined. The paper surveys existing methods for mapping user requirements to the network. An adaptable communication system is implemented to validate the mapping. The architecture adapts to varying network conditions caused by congestion so as to maintain user expectations and requirements. The paper also surveys research in the area of adaptable communications architectures and protocols. Our results show that such a user-biased approach to networking does bring tangible benefits to the user

An adaptation framework for new media artworks

In this paper, we are interested in adaptation mechanisms for the design, creation and experimentation of adaptive and interactive new media artworks. Through a concrete case study, we propose an adaptation framework that combines semantic and physical adaptation and that can be specialized to the specific needs of various new media artists. This adaptation framework is supported by an adaptation engine, the kernel of the software architecture we are currently building. We have validated our adaptation framework through the implementation of a prototype of the adaptation engine. This prototype integrates the management of various types of metadata and allows a representation of adaptation scenarios as policies of the form event-condition-action. \ud We present how we used our adaptation engine to reconstruct and experiment the adaptation model of The Man of the Crowd, an existing adaptive new media installation, where the artist introduces a semantic adaptation of the video content displayed on four screens, according to the relative position of the viewer in the artistic installation

Surveillance Video for Mobile Devices

In this paper, we present a video encoding scheme that uses object-based adaptation to deliver surveillance video to mobile devices. The method relies on a set of complementary video adaptation strategies and generates content that matches various appliance and network resources. Prior to encoding, some of the adaptation strategies exploit video object segmentation and selective filtering in order to improve the perceived quality. Moreover, object segmentation enables the generation of automatic summaries and of simplified versions of the monitored scene. The performance of individual adaptation strategies is assessed using an objective video quality metric, which is also used to select the strategy that provides maximum value for the user under a given set of constraints. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the scheme on standard surveillance test sequences and realistic mobile client resource profiles

STEER: Exploring the dynamic relationship between social information and networked media through experimentation

With the growing popularity of social networks, online video services and smart phones, the traditional content consumers are becoming the editors and broadcasters of their own stories. Within the EU FP7 project STEER, project partners have developed a novel system of new algorithms and toolsets that extract and analyse social informatics generated by social networks. Combined with advanced networking technologies, the platform creates services that offer more personalized and accurate content discovery and retrieval services. The STEER system has been deployed in multiple geographical locations during live social events such as the 2014 Winter Olympics. Our use case experiments demonstrate the feasibility and efficiency of the underlying technologies

Video adaptation using the Variation Factory

Abstract-Video adaptation is an active research area aiming at delivering heterogeneous content to yet heterogeneous devices under different network conditions. This paper presents an architecture for generating variations (different versions) from an MPEG-4 source video to be used during adaptation. Different products are defined and the Variation Factory is introduced. It generates different versions of the source and an MPEG-7 metadata document. The information contained in the metadata document helps the system to identify the most appropriate version that meets the required Quality of Service (QoS). In addition to the implementation of the commonly used reduction methods, two novel methods, viz. object-based and segmentbased variations are introduced. Our proposals are implemented and experimentally validated

Flexible media transport framework based on service composition for future network

This work introduces common guidelines defined in several standardization organisms towards future networks based on the actual mechanisms and protocols used to treat the multimedia data, most of them placed in the application layer of the OSI reference model.Peer ReviewedPreprin

QoS framework for video streaming in home networks

In this thesis we present a new SNR scalable video coding scheme. An important advantage of the proposed scheme is that it requires just a standard video decoder for processing each layer. The quality of the delivered video depends on the allocation of bit rates to the base and enhancement layers. For a given total bit rate, the combination with a bigger base layer delivers higher quality. The absence of dependencies between frames in enhancement layers makes the system resilient to losses of arbitrary frames from an enhancement layer. Furthermore, that property can be used in a more controlled fashion. An important characteristic of any video streaming scheme is the ability to handle network bandwidth fluctuations. We made a streaming technique that observes the network conditions and based on the observations reconfigures the layer configuration in order to achieve the best possible quality. A change of the network conditions forces a change in the number of layers or the bit rate of these layers. Knowledge of the network conditions allows delivery of a video of higher quality by choosing an optimal layer configuration. When the network degrades, the amount of data transmitted per second is decreased by skipping frames from an enhancement layer on the sender side. The presented video coding scheme allows skipping any frame from an enhancement layer, thus enabling an efficient real-time control over transmission at the network level and fine-grained control over the decoding of video data. The methodology proposed is not MPEG-2 specific and can be applied to other coding standards. We made a terminal resource manager that enables trade-offs between quality and resource consumption due to the use of scalable video coding in combination with scalable video algorithms. The controller developed for the decoding process optimizes the perceived quality with respect to the CPU power available and the amount of input data. The controller does not depend on the type of scalability technique and can therefore be used with any scalable video. The controller uses the strategy that is created offline by means of a Markov Decision Process. During the evaluation it was found that the correctness of the controller behavior depends on the correctness of parameter settings for MDP, so user tests should be employed to find the optimal settings