Adaptation of scalable multimedia documents

Abstract

Several scalable media codecs have been standardized in recent years to cope with heterogeneous usage conditions and to aim at always providing audio, video and image content in the best possible quality. Today, interactive multimedia presentations are becoming accessible on handheld terminals and face the same adaptation challenges as the media elements they present: quite diversified screen, memory and processing power capabilities. In this paper, we address the adaptation of multimedia documents by applying the concept of scalability to their presentation. The Scalable MSTI document model introduced in this paper has been designed with two main requirements in mind. First, the adaptation process must be simple to execute because it may be performed on limited terminals in broadcast scenarios. Second, the adaptation process must be simple to describe so that authored adaptation directives can be transported along with the document with a limited bandwidth overhead. The Scalable MSTI model achieves both objectives by specifying Spatial, Temporal and Interactive scalability axes on which incremental authoring can be performed to create progressive presentation layers. Our experiments are conducted on scalable multimedia documents designed for Digital Radio services on DMB channels using MPEG-4 BIFS and also for web services using XHTML, SVG, SMIL and Flash. A scalable image gallery is described throughout this article and illustrates the features offered by our document model in a rich multimedia example