Cross-layer optimization for SVC video delivery over the IEEE 802.11e wireless networks

The Scalable Video Coding (SVC) standard extends the H.264/AVC with scalability support and is effective to adapt bitrate to the time-varying wireless channel bandwidth. In this paper, we propose a cross-layer optimization scheme, which includes packet prioritization and QoS mapping, for the delivery of SVC over the IEEE 802.11e wireless networks. The proposed structure enables interaction among different network layers, providing differentiated services for video packets. Our cross-layer optimization performs with the following information: (i) SVC packet prioritization at the application layer, (ii) service differentiation at the MAC layer, and (iii) interface queue (IFQ) occupation status at the link layer. We formulate the QoS mapping problem as a joint optimization of access category (AC) assignment and IFQ control. A novel and efficient solution is proposed to reduce the computational complexity of the joint optimization problem. Simulation results show that the proposed approach achieves notable improvement when compared to conventional methods.     

Toward an improvement of H.264 video transmission over IEEE 802.11e through a cross-layer architecture

The recently developed H.264 video standard achieves efficient encoding over a bandwidth ranging from a few kilobits per second to several megabits per second. Hence, transporting H.264 video is expected to be an important component of many wireless multimedia services, such as video conferencing, real-time network gaming, and TV broadcasting. However, due to wireless channel characteristics and lack of QoS support, the basic 802.11-based channel access procedure is merely sufficient to deliver non-real-time traffic. The delivery should be augmented by appropriate mechanisms to better consider different QoS requirements and ultimately adjust the medium access parameters to the video data content characteristics. In this article we address H.264 wireless video transmission over IEEE 802.11 WLAN by proposing a robust cross-layer architecture that leverages the inherent H.264 error resilience tools (i.e., data partitioning); and the existing QoS-based IEEE 802.11e MAC protocol possibilities. The performances of the proposed architecture are extensively investigated by simulations. Results obtained indicate that compared to 802.11 and 802.11e, our cross-layer architecture allows graceful video degradation while minimizing the mean packet loss and end-to-end delays.     

Hierarchical B-picture mode decision in H.264/SVC

To enable robust video transmission over heterogeneous networks, the hierarchical B-picture prediction structure is employed in the state-of-the-art video coding standard H.264/SVC, aiming to produce scalable bitstreams with various frame rates. However, the exhaustive mode decision process with the hierarchical B-picture structure increases the computational complexity of H.264/SVC encoding dramatically. In this paper, a fast mode decision algorithm is proposed to speed up H.264/SVC encoding with the hierarchical B-picture structure, which is achieved by utilizing macroblock (MB) features, correlation of temporal–spatial neighboring MBs, and the discrepant characteristics of hierarchical layers. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm is able to reduce the encoding time of H.264/SVC significantly for video sequences with a wide range of resolutions, and meanwhile the video quality and compression ratio are well preserved.     

A Practical RTP Packetization Scheme for SVC Video Transport over IP Networks

Scalable video coding (SVC) has been standardized as an extension of the H.264/AVC standard. This paper proposes a practical real‐time transport protocol (RTP) packetization scheme to transport SVC video over IP networks. In combined scalability of SVC, a coded picture of a base or scalable enhancement layer is produced as one or more video layers consisting of network abstraction layer (NAL) units. The SVC NAL unit header contains a (DID, TID, QID) field to identify the association of each SVC NAL unit with its scalable enhancement layer without parsing the payload part of the SVC NAL unit. In this paper, we utilize the (DID, TID, QID) information to derive hierarchical spatio‐temporal relationship of the SVC NAL units. Based on the derivation using the (DID, TID, QID) field, we propose a practical RTP packetization scheme for generating single RTP sessions in unicast and multicast transport of SVC video. The experimental results indicate that the proposed packetization scheme can be efficiently applied to transport SVC video over IP networks with little induced delay, jitter, and computational load.     

Robust multipoint and multi-layered transmission of H.264/SVC with Raptor codes

The scalable extension of the H.264 Advanced Video Coding (AVC) standard called Scalable Video Coding (SVC), or H.264/SVC, provides scalable video streams which are composed by a base layer and one or more enhancement layers. Enhancement layers may improve the temporal, the spatial or the signal-to-noise ratio resolutions of the content represented by the lower layers. One of the applications of this video coding standard is related to point-to-multipoint video distributions in both wired and wireless communication systems, where packet losses contribute to the degradation of the user’s Quality of Experience. Designed for the transmission of data over Binary Erasure Channels (BEC), Raptor codes are a Forward Error Correction (FEC) mechanism that is gaining popularity for Internet Protocol Television (IPTV) applications due to their small decoding complexity and reduced overhead. This paper evaluates the quality enhancements introduced by the integration of several H.264/SVC layers with a Raptor coding protection scheme. Our goal is to improve the distribution of video over loss prone networks in terms of rate-distortion performance by assessing several alternative packetization options and protection schemes.     

A fast algorithm of bitstream extraction using distortion prediction based on simulated annealing

Scalable video streams can be extracted to meet the bandwidth limitation of different networks and end-users. Bitstream extraction is usually performed at the network proxy or gateway during transmission, where a low computational complexity is always preferred. How to quickly and accurately select the best resolution combination for a video to meet different bandwidth requirements by each user is crucial in bitstream extraction. In this paper a fast algorithm of bitstream extraction for scalable video is proposed. The interlayer dependency between the base quality layer and the first quality layer was used to predict the distortion of higher quality layers. When quality of every layer is available, the proposed method searches for the optimized combination of quality layers based on simulated annealing. Experimental results show that the proposed method provides an optimized performance, which is significantly higher than that can be achieved by the basic extraction method. Compared to the quality layer based extraction method in the reference software model of H.264/SVC (i.e., JSVM), the proposed algorithm can greatly decrease the decoding times from 2NT to only 2 without losing rate-distortion performance. Furthermore, the proposed method obtains a more smoothed video quality which is always favorable to the observer.     

Priority-Aware Packet Pre-marking for DiffServ Architecture Based on H.264/SVC Video Stream Structure

The H264/SVC codec allows for generation of hierarchical video streams. In the stream of this type video data belonging to different layers have different priority depending on their importance to the quality of the video and the decoding process. This creates new demands on the mechanisms of packet marking, and thus new challenges for the policy guaranteeing QoS parameters, such as those defined in the DiffServ architecture. Therefore, mechanisms of the traffic engineering used in the DiffServ network should, as far as possible, take into account internal distribution of priorities inside video streams. This may be achieved by implementing an appropriate method for packet pre-marking. The paper describes the Weighted Priority Pre-marking (WPP) algorithm for priority-aware SVC video streaming over a DiffServ network. Our solution takes into account the relative importance of the Network Abstraction Layer Units. It also does not require any changes in the implementation of the DiffServ marker algorithm. The results presented confirm that video transmission in the DiffServ domain, based on the WPP packet pre-marking, can provide better perceived video quality than the standard (best effort) streaming of multi-layered SVC video. In addition, a comparison with the transmission of the same video content encoded with the H264/AVC codec also points to the superiority of our proposed method.

     

基于H.264/SVC的视频加密技术研究

随着网络的不断普及和发展,视频数据在网络中有了越来越多的应用,随之也提出了视频安全的问题,通过视频加密可以很好地解决此问题。文中分析了目前主流的H.264SVC标准所采用的可分级视频编码技术,根据视频分级编码特点选取关键信息进行分层加密,实现不同级别的视频加密。同时,所提方案采用了序列密码进行加密,具有较高的安全性。试验结果表明:该方案具有安全性高、复杂度适中、实时性好等特点。     

Optimized Bit Extraction Using Distortion Modeling in the Scalable Extension of H.264/AVC

The newly adopted scalable extension of H.264/AVC video coding standard (SVC) demonstrates significant improvements in coding efficiency in addition to an increased degree of supported scalability relative to the scalable profiles of prior video coding standards. Due to the complicated hierarchical prediction structure of the SVC and the concept of key pictures, content-aware rate adaptation of SVC bit streams to intermediate bit rates is a nontrivial task. The concept of quality layers has been introduced in the design of the SVC to allow for fast content-aware prioritized rate adaptation. However, existing quality layer assignment methods are suboptimal and do not consider all network abstraction layer (NAL) units from different layers for the optimization. In this paper, we first propose a technique to accurately and efficiently estimate the quality degradation resulting from discarding an arbitrary number of NAL units from multiple layers of a bitstream by properly taking drift into account. Then, we utilize this distortion estimation technique to assign quality layers to NAL units for a more efficient extraction. Experimental results show that a significant gain can be achieved by the proposed scheme.      

一种快速的SVC多模式决策方法

H.264/AVC SVC为了提供一种可伸缩的视频编码解决方案,增加了许多宏块模式的组合,从而导致模式决策的计算量大幅度增加。本文提出了一种面向SVC的快速多模式决策算法,该方法首先利用模式在层间、帧间和空间的相关性,决定当前宏块的起始搜索模式,然后利用相邻运动向量的差异性决定是否合并或拆分当前分块进行细化搜索。从测试结果来看,本算法在率失真性能不降低的情况下,令模式决策的运算速度提高了数倍。     

Applications and improvement of H.264 in medical video compression

This paper aims at applying H.264 in medical video compression applications and improving the H.264 rate control algorithm with better perceptual quality. First, H.264 is briefly reviewed and introduced to the area of medical video compression. Second, a new motion complexity (MC) measure is defined to express the complexity of motion contents in a video frame, and a new H.264 rate control scheme with the MC measure and perceptual bit allocation is proposed for medical video compression. Third, two sets of experiments are conducted: the comparison between MPEG-4 and H.264, and the comparison between JVT-H014 , which is the H.264 adopted rate control algorithm, and our proposed rate control scheme. The first set of experiments shows that compared with MPEG-4, H.264 can achieve a significant average peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) gain of up to 4.35 dB for the test medical video sequences, and thus is much more effective when applied in medical video compression. The second set of experiments shows that compared with H014, the proposed rate control scheme can achieve better perceptual video quality, with an average PSNR gain of up to 0.19 dB for the test medical video sequences.     

A rate-control algorithm using inter-layer information for H.264/SVC for low-delay applications

This paper proposes a novel frame-level rate-control scheme for H.264/SVC for low-delay applications. The trend of the Mean Absolute Difference (MAD) (after motion compensation) of the reference layer is used as the inter-layer information for Inter-layer MAD prediction, which is combined with Intra-layer MAD prediction to predict the MAD of the enhancement layers (EL) more accurately. By considering the influence from both the texture and nontexture information, the varying picture complexity and feedback information from the actual encoding results are combined to achieve an accurate bit-allocation. A coarse-to-fine initial quantization parameter (QP) selection method is proposed to refine the initial QP of the EL according to the channel condition and the video sequence characteristics. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed scheme can obtain high and smooth PSNR, and the output bit-rate is close to the target bit-rate. Also, the proposed scheme can avoid serious buffer fullness fluctuation and reduce skipped frames in the video coding.     

Motion-refined rewriting of H.264/AVC-coded video to SVC streams

In this paper, we discuss motion-refined rewriting of single-layer H.264/AVC streams to SVC streams with multiple quality layers. First, we elaborate on techniques we developed for efficient rewriting of residual data from H.264/AVC to SVC. We investigate if rate-distortion performance can further be improved by extending these architectures with motion refinement techniques, which exploit the inter-layer motion prediction mechanisms available in SVC. For optimum performance, we discuss a fast rate-distortion technique based on Lagrangian relaxation. Although motion refinement in the transform-domain leads to extra distortion in the bitstream, we show that our rate-distortion model successfully takes into account both base and enhancement layer rate and distortion during optimization. Implementation results show that motion-refined rewriting in the transform domain can increase rate-distortion performance, with gains of up to 0.5 dB for the SVC base layer. The presented rewriting architectures significantly reduce the computational complexity when compared to reencoding, with a speed-up by a factor of forty or more, even in the case of motion refinement.     

An efficient scalable intra coding algorithm for spatial scalability in enhancement layer

Scalable video coding (SVC) is attractive due to the capability of reconstructing lower resolution or lower quality signals from partial bit streams, which allows for simple solutions adaptted to network and terminal capabilities. This article addresses the spatial scalability of SVC and proposes an efficient H.264-based scalable intra coding algorithm. In comparison with precious single layer intra prediction (SLIP) method, the proposed algorithm aims to improve the intra coding performance of the enhancement layer by a new inter layer intra prediction (ILIP) method. The main idea of ILIP is that up-sampled and reconstructed pixels of the base layer are very useful to predict and encode those pixels of the enhancement layer, especially when those neighbouring pixels are not available. Experimental results show that the peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR) data of luminance component of encoded frames are improved, and both bit-rates and computation complexity are maintained very well. For sequence Football, the average increase of PSNR is up to 0.21?dB, while for Foreman and Bus, they are 0.14?dB and 0.17?dB, respectively.     

Bandwidth-aware routing and admission control for efficient video streaming over MANETs

In this paper, we develop and evaluate an adaptive self-configurable routing framework that can deal with dynamic nature of mobile ad hoc networks and provides quality-of-service (QoS) guarantees for efficient video streaming. Proposed framework mainly consists of two major components. Firstly, it is a reactive bandwidth-aware node-disjoint multipath routing protocol which determines routes based on the specified bandwidth requirements of the requesting application. The second component of the framework is a session admission control (SAC) process that permits or denies a session to enter into the network based on the current availability of network bandwidth. We also propose methods to handle QoS violations caused by network mobility and congestion by keeping backup routes, performing local route recovery, avoiding routing through short-lived low quality links and periodic monitoring of the active transmission routes. To verify our proposed algorithms, the network with H.264/SVC encoded video traces which are generated from real-time video traffic is used for modeling the behaviour of the source nodes. It has been observed that reactively discovered and maintained routes on the basis of the most recent information about network topology and available resources can significantly improve the admission decision accuracy of SAC process, in turn improving the quality of received video traffic significantly.

     

Frame distortion estimation for unequal error protection methods in scalable video coding (SVC)

In many multimedia applications, coded video is transmitted over error prone heterogeneous networks. Because of the predictive mechanism used in video coding, transmission error would propagate temporally and spatially and would result in significant quality losses. In order to address this problem, different error resilience methods have been proposed. One of the techniques, which is commonly used in video streaming, is unequal error protection (UEP) of scalable video coding (SVC). In this technique, different independent layers of an SVC stream are protected differently and based on their importance by using forward error correction (FEC) codes. Accurately analyzing the importance or utility of each video part is a critical component and would lead to a better protection and higher quality of the received video. Calculation of the utility is usually based on multiple decoding of sub-bitstreams and is highly computationally complex. In this work, we propose an accurate low complexity utility estimation technique that can be used in different applications. This technique estimates the utility of each network abstraction layer (NAL) by considering the error propagation to future frames. We utilize this method in an UEP framework with the scalable extension of H.264/AVC codec and it achieves almost the same performance as highly complex estimation techniques (an average loss of 0.05 dB). Furthermore, we propose a low delay version of this technique that can be used in delay constrained application. The estimation accuracy and performance of our proposed technique are studied extensively.     

H.264/SVC vs. H.264/AVC video quality comparison under QoE-driven seamless handoff

This paper studies the impact of mobility management and seamless handover mechanisms on the perceived quality of video streaming applications. A seamless handoff scheme is proposed that incorporates IEEE 802.21 Media Independent Handover framework and a QoE-driven rate adaptation scheme, for both scalable and single layer coding. Quality of Experience (QoE) has been considered as an important parameter for network selection. The proposed scheme has been implemented and evaluated in a real test-bed network. Objective and subjective quality evaluation measurements for both H.264/AVC and H.264/SVC have been carried out. Through experimentation, QoE driven mobility of video streaming can be better maintained with H.264/SVC under the combined seamless handoff and rate adaptation functionality.     

An adaptive cross-layer mapping algorithm for MPEG-4 video transmission over IEEE 802.11e WLAN

This paper proposes an adaptive cross-layer mapping algorithm to improve the transmission quality of MPEG-4 video stream over an IEEE 802.11e wireless network. Instead of classifying video data to a specific access category in an 802.11e network, we propose an algorithm that dynamically maps MPEG-4 video packets to appropriate access categories according to both the significance of the video data and the network traffic load. Our proposed cross-layer architecture passes information about the significance of video packets from the application layer to the media access control layer. The queue length of a specific access category is used to deduce the network traffic load. We conducted a performance evaluation of our proposed cross-layer approach under both light and heavily loaded network conditions. Our simulation results demonstrate: (a) superior performance of our proposed approach (under both light and heavy loads) over 802.11e (Enhanced Distributed Channel Access (EDCA) and static mapping schemes, (b) not only guarantees prioritized transmission of essential video data but also provides efficient queue length utilization.     

Random linear network coding with ladder-shaped global coding matrix for robust video transmission

Robust video multicast in erasure networks using network coding (NC) to reduce the impact of packet loss is studied in this paper. In our proposed solution, random linear network coding (RLNC) is adopted at intermediate nodes of the network. RLNC linearly combines a group of packets by randomly selecting weighting coefficients on a finite field, and the loss of an RLNC-coded packet is equivalent to the loss of one constraint in a linear system of equations required for RLNC decoding. Unless the global coding coefficient matrix, or simply called the global coding matrix (GCM), is of full rank, a receive node cannot reconstruct all source packets. To address this rank deficiency problem, we propose to construct a special-structured GCM, called the ladder-shaped GCM (LGCM), for layered H.264/SVC (scalable video coding) video multicast. The ladder shape of the sparse coding matrix is maintained throughout the RLNC process to achieve two objectives: (1) to enable partial decoding of a block; and (2) to provide unequal erasure protection for H.264/SVC priority layers. Furthermore, quality degradation is minimized by optimizing the amount of redundancy assigned to each layer, and graceful quality degradation is achieved by error concealment (EC). Simulation results are given to demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed RLNC–LGCM scheme over the traditional RLNC with a generalGCM.