Rate-Distortion Optimized Streaming of Fine-Grained Scalable Video Sequences

Video streaming over the Internet is increasing in popularity. Many video objects are made available online and many users are streaming video everyday. In addition, the increasing processing power of personal computers, and the availability of high-speed Internet services, encourages users to demand more, higher-quality video content. To provide high-quality and to accommodate clients with various resources, fine-grained scalable (FGS) video coding has been proposed as part of the recent MPEG-4 and H.264 standards. While FGS encoding improves rate scalability and error resiliency, it introduces new, challenging problems that need to be addressed to make FGS usable in practical video streaming systems. In this project, we consider one of the main research problems with FSG: optimal allocation of streaming rates to multiple senders streaming in a single receiver. Streaming from multiple senders is necessary in peer-to-peer streaming environments because of the limited capacity and unreliability of peers. Multiple senders are also desired in distributed streaming systems to achieve disjoint network path streaming and hence better quality. The intern will address this problem in several steps: 1) The quality of individual frames in the sequence will be optimized; 2) The sequence will be divided into blocks of frames each with a fixed number of frames; 3) The optimization problem for each block will be formulated and solved. Solving the allocation problem at the block level is important because it will allow the research team to prioritize parts from all frames to maximize the video quality. Significant quality improvement is expected to be achieved because of the optimal allocation of bit rates to senders.

Faculty Supervisor:

Dr. Mohamed Hefeeda

Student:

ChengHsin Hsu

Partner:

CBC Radio

Discipline:

Computer science

Sector:

Information and communications technologies

University:

Simon Fraser University