88 research outputs found
Quality of Experience and Adaptation Techniques for Multimedia Communications
The widespread use of multimedia services on the World Wide Web and the advances
in end-user portable devices have recently increased the user demands for better quality.
Moreover, providing these services seamlessly and ubiquitously on wireless networks and
with user mobility poses hard challenges. To meet these challenges and fulfill the end-user
requirements, suitable strategies need to be adopted at both application level and network
level. At the application level rate and quality have to be adapted to time-varying bandwidth
limitations, whereas on the network side a mechanism for efficient use of the network
resources has to be implemented, to provide a better end-user Quality of Experience (QoE)
through better Quality of Service (QoS). The work in this thesis addresses these issues by
first investigating multi-stream rate adaptation techniques for Scalable Video Coding (SVC)
applications aimed at a fair provision of QoE to end-users. Rate Distortion (R-D) models
for real-time and non real-time video streaming have been proposed and a rate adaptation
technique is also developed to minimize with fairness the distortion of multiple videos
with difference complexities. To provide resiliency against errors, the effect of Unequal
Error protection (UXP) based on Reed Solomon (RS) encoding with erasure correction has
been also included in the proposed R-D modelling. Moreover, to improve the support of
QoE at the network level for multimedia applications sensitive to delays, jitters and packet
drops, a technique to prioritise different traffic flows using specific QoS classes within an
intermediate DiffServ network integrated with a WiMAX access system is investigated.
Simulations were performed to test the network under different congestion scenarios
Cross-layer optimization of unequal protected layered video over hierarchical modulation
Abstract-unequal protection mechanisms have been proposed at several layers in order to improve the reliability of multimedia contents, especially for video data. The paper aims at implementing a multi-layer unequal protection scheme, which is based on a Physical-Transport-Application cross-layer design. Hierarchical modulation, in the physical layer, has been demonstrated to increase the overall user capacity of a wireless communications. On the other hand, unequal erasure protection codes at the transport layer turned out to be an efficient method to protect video data generated by the application layer by exploiting their intrinsic properties. In this paper, the two techniques are jointly optimized in order to enable recovering lost data in case the protection is performed separately. We show that the cross-layer design proposed herein outperforms the performance of hierarchical modulation and unequal erasure codes taken independently
Robust P2P Live Streaming
Projecte fet en col.laboració amb la Fundació i2CATThe provisioning of robust real-time communication services (voice, video, etc.) or media contents through the Internet in a distributed manner is an important challenge,
which will strongly influence in current and future Internet evolution. Aware of this, we
are developing a project named Trilogy leaded by the i2CAT Foundation, which has as
main pillar the study, development and evaluation of Peer-to-Peer (P2P) Live
streaming architectures for the distribution of high-quality media contents. In this
context, this work concretely covers media coding aspects and proposes the use of
Multiple Description Coding (MDC) as a flexible solution for providing robust and
scalable live streaming over P2P networks. This work describes current state of the art
in media coding techniques and P2P streaming architectures, presents the
implemented prototype as well as its simulation and validation results
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3D multiple description coding for error resilience over wireless networks
This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel University.Mobile communications has gained a growing interest from both customers and service providers alike in the last 1-2 decades. Visual information is used in many application domains such as remote health care, video –on demand, broadcasting, video surveillance etc. In order to enhance the visual effects of digital video content, the depth perception needs to be provided with the actual visual content. 3D video has earned a significant interest from the research community in recent years, due to the tremendous impact it leaves on viewers and its enhancement of the user’s quality of experience (QoE). In the near future, 3D video is likely to be used in most video applications, as it offers a greater sense of immersion and perceptual experience. When 3D video is compressed and transmitted over error prone channels, the associated packet loss leads to visual quality degradation. When a picture is lost or corrupted so severely that the concealment result is not acceptable, the receiver typically pauses video playback and waits for the next INTRA picture to resume decoding. Error propagation caused by employing predictive coding may degrade the video quality severely. There are several ways used to mitigate the effects of such transmission errors. One widely used technique in International Video Coding Standards is error resilience.
The motivation behind this research work is that, existing schemes for 2D colour video compression such as MPEG, JPEG and H.263 cannot be applied to 3D video content. 3D video signals contain depth as well as colour information and are bandwidth demanding, as they require the transmission of multiple high-bandwidth 3D video streams. On the other hand, the capacity of wireless channels is limited and wireless links are prone to various types of errors caused by noise, interference, fading, handoff, error burst and network congestion. Given the maximum bit rate budget to represent the 3D scene, optimal bit-rate allocation between texture and depth information rendering distortion/losses should be minimised. To mitigate the effect of these errors on the perceptual 3D video quality, error resilience video coding needs to be investigated further to offer better quality of experience (QoE) to end users.
This research work aims at enhancing the error resilience capability of compressed 3D video, when transmitted over mobile channels, using Multiple Description Coding (MDC) in order to improve better user’s quality of experience (QoE).
Furthermore, this thesis examines the sensitivity of the human visual system (HVS) when employed to view 3D video scenes. The approach used in this study is to use subjective testing in order to rate people’s perception of 3D video under error free and error prone conditions through the use of a carefully designed bespoke questionnaire.Petroleum Technology Development Fund (PTDF
A Study on the Usage of Cross-Layer Power Control and Forward Error Correction for Embedded Video Transmission over Wireless Links
Cross-layering is a design paradigm for overcoming the limitations deriving from the ISO/OSI layering principle, thus improving the performance of communications in specific scenarios, such as wireless multimedia communications. However, most available solutions are based on empirical considerations, and do not provide a theoretical background supporting such approaches. The paper aims at providing an analytical framework for the study of single-hop video delivery over a wireless link, enabling cross-layer interactions for performance optimization using power control and FEC and providing a useful tool to determine the potential gain deriving from the employment of such design paradigm. The analysis is performed using rate-distortion information of an embedded video bitstream jointly with a Lagrangian power minimization approach. Simulation results underline that cross-layering can provide relevant improvement in specific environments and that the proposed approach is able to capitalize on the advantage deriving from its deployment
Robust P2P Live Streaming
Projecte fet en col.laboració amb la Fundació i2CATThe provisioning of robust real-time communication services (voice, video, etc.) or media contents through the Internet in a distributed manner is an important challenge,
which will strongly influence in current and future Internet evolution. Aware of this, we
are developing a project named Trilogy leaded by the i2CAT Foundation, which has as
main pillar the study, development and evaluation of Peer-to-Peer (P2P) Live
streaming architectures for the distribution of high-quality media contents. In this
context, this work concretely covers media coding aspects and proposes the use of
Multiple Description Coding (MDC) as a flexible solution for providing robust and
scalable live streaming over P2P networks. This work describes current state of the art
in media coding techniques and P2P streaming architectures, presents the
implemented prototype as well as its simulation and validation results
Energy-efficient bandwidth allocation for multiuser scalable video streaming over WLAN
We consider the problem of packet scheduling for the transmission of multiple video streams over a wireless local area network (WLAN). A cross-layer optimization framework is proposed to minimize the wireless transceiver energy consumption while meeting the user required visual quality constraints. The framework relies on the IEEE 802.11 standard and on the embedded bitstream structure of the scalable video coding scheme. It integrates an application-level video quality metric as QoS constraint (instead of a communication layer quality metric) with energy consumption optimization through link layer scaling and sleeping. Both energy minimization and min-max energy optimization strategies are discussed. Simulation results demonstrate significant energy gains compared to the state-of-the-art approaches
Scalable Video Streaming for Single-Hop Wireless Networks Using a Contention-Based Access MAC Protocol
Limited bandwidth and high packet loss rate pose a serious challenge for video streaming applications over
wireless networks. Even when packet loss is not present, the bandwidth fluctuation, as a result of an arbitrary number of active flows in an IEEE 802.11 network, can significantly degrade the video quality. This paper aims to enhance the quality of video streaming applications in wireless home networks via a joint optimization of video layer-allocation technique, admission control algorithm, and medium access control (MAC) protocol. Using an Aloha-like MAC protocol, we propose a novel admission control framework, which can be viewed as an optimization problem that maximizes the average quality of admitted videos, given a specified minimum video quality for each flow. We present some hardness results for the optimization problem under various conditions and propose some heuristic algorithms for finding a good solution. In particular, we show that a simple greedy layer-allocation algorithm can perform reasonably well, although it is typically not optimal. Consequently, we present a more expensive heuristic algorithm that guarantees to approximate the optimal solution within a constant factor. Simulation results demonstrate that our
proposed framework can improve the video quality up to 26% as compared to those of the existing approaches
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