Scalable Video Transcaling for the Wireless Internet

• Main Authors: van der Schaar Mihaela, Radha Hayder, Karande Shirish
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: SpringerOpen 2004-01-01
• Series: EURASIP Journal on Advances in Signal Processing
• Subjects: transcoding; FGS; scalable; video; transcaling; streaming
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/S111086570430805X

<p/> <p>The rapid and unprecedented increase in the heterogeneity of multimedia networks and devices emphasizes the need for scalable and adaptive video solutions both for coding and transmission purposes. However, in general, there is an inherent trade-off between the level of scalability and the quality of scalable video streams. In other words, the higher the bandwidth variation, the lower the overall video quality of the scalable stream that is needed to support the desired bandwidth range. In this paper, we introduce the notion of wireless video transcaling (TS), which is a generalization of (nonscalable) transcoding. With TS, a scalable video stream, that covers a given bandwidth range, is mapped into one or more scalable video streams covering different bandwidth ranges. Our proposed TS framework exploits the fact that the level of heterogeneity changes at different points of the video distribution tree over wireless and mobile Internet networks. This provides the opportunity to improve the video quality by performing the appropriate TS process. We argue that an Internet/wireless network gateway represents a good candidate for performing TS. Moreover, we describe hierarchical TS (HTS), which provides a &#147;Transcaler&#148; with the option of choosing among different levels of TS processes with different complexities. We illustrate the benefits of TS by considering the recently developed MPEG-4 fine granularity scalability (FGS) video coding. Extensive simulation results of video TS over bit rate ranges supported by emerging wireless LANs are presented.</p>