267 research outputs found
Minimum Distortion Variance Concatenated Block Codes for Embedded Source Transmission
Some state-of-art multimedia source encoders produce embedded source bit
streams that upon the reliable reception of only a fraction of the total bit
stream, the decoder is able reconstruct the source up to a basic quality.
Reliable reception of later source bits gradually improve the reconstruction
quality. Examples include scalable extensions of H.264/AVC and progressive
image coders such as JPEG2000. To provide an efficient protection for embedded
source bit streams, a concatenated block coding scheme using a minimum mean
distortion criterion was considered in the past. Although, the original design
was shown to achieve better mean distortion characteristics than previous
studies, the proposed coding structure was leading to dramatic quality
fluctuations. In this paper, a modification of the original design is first
presented and then the second order statistics of the distortion is taken into
account in the optimization. More specifically, an extension scheme is proposed
using a minimum distortion variance optimization criterion. This robust system
design is tested for an image transmission scenario. Numerical results show
that the proposed extension achieves significantly lower variance than the
original design, while showing similar mean distortion performance using both
convolutional codes and low density parity check codes.Comment: 6 pages, 4 figures, In Proc. of International Conference on
Computing, Networking and Communications, ICNC 2014, Hawaii, US
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
NUM-Based Rate Allocation for Streaming Traffic via Sequential Convex Programming
In recent years, there has been an increasing demand for ubiquitous streaming
like applications in data networks. In this paper, we concentrate on NUM-based
rate allocation for streaming applications with the so-called S-curve utility
functions. Due to non-concavity of such utility functions, the underlying NUM
problem would be non-convex for which dual methods might become quite useless.
To tackle the non-convex problem, using elementary techniques we make the
utility of the network concave, however this results in reverse-convex
constraints which make the problem non-convex. To deal with such a transformed
NUM, we leverage Sequential Convex Programming (SCP) approach to approximate
the non-convex problem by a series of convex ones. Based on this approach, we
propose a distributed rate allocation algorithm and demonstrate that under mild
conditions, it converges to a locally optimal solution of the original NUM.
Numerical results validate the effectiveness, in terms of tractable convergence
of the proposed rate allocation algorithm.Comment: 6 pages, conference submissio
RBF-Based QP Estimation Model for VBR Control in H.264/SVC
In this paper we propose a novel variable bit rate (VBR) controller for real-time H.264/scalable video coding (SVC) applications. The proposed VBR controller relies on the fact that consecutive pictures within the same scene often exhibit similar degrees of complexity, and consequently should be encoded using similar quantization parameter (QP) values for the sake of quality consistency. In oder to prevent unnecessary QP fluctuations, the proposed VBR controller allows for just an incremental variation of QP with respect to that of the previous picture, focusing on the design of an effective method for estimating this QP variation. The implementation in H.264/SVC requires to locate a rate controller at each dependency layer (spatial or coarse grain scalability). In particular, the QP increment estimation at each layer is computed by means of a radial basis function (RBF) network that is specially designed for this purpose. Furthermore, the RBF network design process was conceived to provide an effective solution for a wide range of practical real-time VBR applications for scalable video content delivery. In order to assess the proposed VBR controller, two real-time application scenarios were simulated: mobile live streaming and IPTV broadcast. It was compared to constant QP encoding and a recently proposed constant bit rate (CBR) controller for H.264/SVC. The experimental results show that the proposed method achieves remarkably consistent quality, outperforming the reference CBR controller in the two scenarios for all the spatio-temporal resolutions considered.Proyecto CCG10-UC3M/TIC-5570 de la Comunidad Autónoma de Madrid y Universidad Carlos III de MadridPublicad
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