An end-to-end approach for optimal mode selection in Internet video communication: theory and application

Abstract

Abstract| Rate-distortion (R-D) optimized mode selection is a fundamental problem for video communication over packet-switched networks. The classical R-D optimized mode selection only considers quantization distortion at the source. Such approach is unable to achieve global optimality under the error-prone environment since it does not consider the packetization behavior at the source, the transport path characteristics and receiver behavior. This paper presents an end-to-end approach to generalize the classical theory of R-D optimized mode selection for point-to-point v i d e o communication. We i n troduce a notion of global distortion by taking into consideration both the path characteristics (i.e., packet loss) and the receiver behavior (i.e., the error concealment s c heme), in addition to the source behavior (i.e., quantization distortion and packetization). We derive, for the rst time, a set of accurate global distortion metrics for any packetization scheme. Equipped with the global distortion metrics, we design an R-D optimized mode selection algorithm to provide the best trade-o between compression e ciency and error resilience. The theory developed in this paper is general and is applicable to many video coding standards, including H.261/263 and MPEG-1/2/4. As an application, we i n tegrate our theory with point-to-point MPEG-4 video conferencing over the Internet, where a feedback mechanism is employed to convey the path characteristics (estimated at the receiver) and receiver behavior (error concealment s c heme) to the source. Simulation results conclusively demonstrate that our end-to-end approach o ers superior performance over the classical approach f o r I n ternet video conferencing.

Survey of Error Correction Mechanisms for Video Streaming over the Internet

“…Many study have done the error resilient source coding problem by using the optimal mode selection with (R-D) [19,34].…”

“…Many study have been done the error resilient source coding problem by using the optimal mode selection with (R-D) [19,34].Error-resilient [32], [33]schemes deal with packet loss on the compression layer like the error concealment. These schemes try to prevent error propagation or limit the scope of the damage caused by packet losses on the compression layer by adding redundancy data at the source coding, this technique is composed of resynchronization marking, data partitioning and data recovery.…”

Quality metrics for measuring end-to-end distortion in packet-switched video communication systems

“…Methods for accurately calculating the expected distortion have recently been proposed [8], [9], [10]. The main contribution of these approaches is that they show that under certain conditions, it is possible to accurately compute the expected distortion with finite storage and computational complexity by using per-pixel accurate recursive calculations.…”

“…In [8], Hind's method is based on recursively calculating the distribution of the reconstructed value for each pixel in a frame. A recursively accurate method for calculating the expected mean absolute difference is presented in [10]. In [9], Zhang et al develop a powerful algorithm called ROPE, which efficiently calculates the expected mean squared error by recursively computing only the first and second moment of each pixel in a frame.…”

“…Work on resilient video coding and transmission for packet lossy networks has primarily focused on minimizing the average expected distortion for a frame (or group of frames) [6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20], [27]. In these approaches the end-to-end distortion is defined as…”