Fine-grained scalable streaming from coarse-grained videos

ABSTRACT

Scalable video is an attractive option for adapting the bandwidth consumption of streaming video to the available bandwidth. Fine-grained scalability can adapt most closely to the available bandwidth, but this comes at the cost of a high compression penalty. In the context of VoD streaming to mobile end systems, we have therefore explored whether a similar adaptation to the available bandwidth can be achieved by performing layer switching in coarse-grained scalable videos. In this approach, enhancement layers of a video stream are switched on and off to achieve any desired longer-term bandwidth. We performed user studies to evaluate the idea, and came to the far-from-obvious conclusion that layer switching is viable way for bit-rate savings and fine-grained bit-rate adaptation even for rather short times between layer switches.

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Index Terms

• Computing methodologies

  • Artificial intelligence

    • Computer vision

      • Computer vision problems

        • Video segmentation

      • Computer vision tasks

        • Video summarization

      • Image and video acquisition