Content adaptation
is an important technique for maximizing accessibility and functionalities of
audio-visual content in pervasive or interactive multimedia environments.
In a typical video streaming system, video sequences are encoded in high quality in advanced and stored in the server. Because different networks may have different bandwidths, a gateway can include a transcoder to adapt the video bit rates in order to provide video services to users on different networks. In other words, media transcoding allows the multimedia content delivery to adapt to the wide diversity of client device capabilities in communication, processing, storage, and display.
So users can
have the best possible quality.
1. Media Transcoding Techniques
Transcoding
of coded video is regarded as a down conversion process, where the bit rate of
a compressed bit stream is reduced according to a given constraint.
Quality
jittering is very annoying for video viewers. Therefore, providing constant or
smooth quality is an important goal for video venders.
1) SNR
scaling
The objective of
bit-rate reduction is to reduce the bit rate while maintaining low complexity
and achieving the best quality. (By requantization, coefficient dropping)
2) Spatial
resolution scaling
(e.g., by the adoption of the Dynamic Resolution Conversion
(DRC) tool in Version 2 of the MPEG-4 standard.)
There are two major issues in the spatial resolution
reduction transcoding. One is motion vector mapping from high resolution to low
resolution. Another is mode decision making for the downscale macroblocks.
3) Temporal
resolution scaling
By frame skipping
i. Frame rate reduction:
(uniform frame dropping)
ii. Time condensation
4) Heterogeneous
transcoding
Video format conversion
(e.g., MPEG-2 çè MPEG-4)
2. Research Topic
Given resource constraints, what is the
optimal adaptation operation maximizing the quality of the adapted contents.
This solution also includes the investigation of more sophisticated quality metrics,
which consider human vision systems capturing visual perception.
Implement a specific
transcoder (FD, CD) è Calculate Quality or
Distortion with respect to all possible transcoding cases è Find optimal (best) case
2.2 Transcoder (transcoding methods)
A. Pixel
Domain approach: Conventional cascade (by fully decoding à fully encoding)
B. Compression Domain approach
i.
Open loop architecture: simply requantization
ii.
Close loop architecture: reprocess MCP, reusing MV, drift
compensation
In
this architecture, the full-scale motion estimation is usually not performed to
save computational complexity.
è Reuse motion
vector (by using bilinear interpolation or forward dominant vector selection
method (or activity dominant vector selection)
衱Motion
vector refinement¡± (by using full search or hierarchical search)
è Reduction of
computational complexity
C. Bitstream Syntax
Description (BSD)
Because
of manifold multimedia binary format, it is very hard to adapt multimedia
contents according to each different environment. In case of manipulating the
bitstream of multimedia data including various binary formats, it is more
advantageous to use the structural description of multimedia bitstream than
binary data itself. Once we have the file informing the bitstream structure as
well as bitstream itself, it is possible to adapt contents by just transforming
this description rather than by manipulating bitstream.
<Fig>
Transcoding System Architecture
D. Scalable Video Coding
Encode the
video once è by simply truncation è obtain transcoded result
-
Without any impact on the coding efficiency
-
Layered approach
-
FGS (Fine Granularity Scalability) in MPEG-4
-
Fully scalable video coding: MCTF (Motion Compensated
Temporal Filtering) which is newly being investigated in MPEG SVC.