Interactive media streaming is the communication paradigm where an observer periodically requests new desired
subsets from the streaming sender in real-time, upon which the sender sends the appropriate media data, corresponding
to the received requests, for immediate decoding and display. This is in contrast to non-interactive
media streaming, e.g., TV broadcast, where the entire media set is compressed and delivered to the observer
before the observer interacts with the data (such as switching TV channels). Examples of interactive streaming
abound in different media modalities: interactive browsing of JPEG2000 images, interactive light field or multiview
video streaming, etc. Interactive media streaming has the obvious advantage of bandwidth efficiency: only
the media subsets corresponding to observer's requests are transmitted. This is important when an observer
only views a small subset out of a very large media data set during a typical streaming session. The technical
challenge is how to structure media data such that good compression efficiency can be achieved by exploiting
correlation among media subsets (thus inducing a particular decoding order if correlation is exploited during
encoding), while providing sufficient flexibility for the observer to freely navigate the media data set in his/her
desired unique order. In this overview paper, we survey different proposals in the literature that simultaneously
achieve the conflicting objectives of compression efficiency and decoding flexibility.
KEYWORDS: Computer programming, Data compression, Switching, Video coding, Video, Video compression, Quantization, Forward error correction, Hyperspectral imaging, Error control coding
Some emerging applications may require flexible playback features for time-based media, such as video, that cannot be directly supported by current compression standards, because for these decoding of frames can only be done in a predetermined order. An example would be a video application where both backward and forward frame-by-frame playback are to be supported. A standard codec could support this by decoding complete GOPs in the desired order, and then playing back one frame at a time. Thus, potentially significant added delay and memory are needed to support backward playback, which can be lowered if small GOP sizes are chosen, at the cost of reduced coding efficiency. Other example applications where flexible playback may be desirable include switching between different views in multiview video coding, and accessing individual spectral bands in hyperspectral imagery. In this work we address flexible playback by showing that it becomes feasible when a particular data unit (e.g., a video frame) can be decoded using information from either one of a number of other data units (e.g., in the video case the next frame or the previous frame). Note that this is different from structures such as bi-directionally predicted frames, which require both predictor frames to be available at the decoder. We cast this problem as one of source coding with uncertainty about decoder side-information and propose a solution based on distributed source coding. In addition, we propose macroblock-based mode switching algorithms in the context of distributed video coding to improve coding efficiency. Our results show that, using forward/backward playback as an example, our proposed solution can achieve good coding efficiency without incurring additional delay and memory overhead.
Conference Committee Involvement (1)
Parallel Processing for Imaging Applications
24 January 2011 | San Francisco Airport, California, United States
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