Claypool

Courses

Publications

Students

Projects

Service

Downloads

Misc


WPI (Worcester Polytechnic Institute)

Computer Science Department
------------------------------------------

Video Redundancy - A Best-Effort Solution to Network Data Loss

Yanlin Liu

Advisor: Professor Mark Claypool

M.S. Thesis
Computer Science, WPI
May 1999

Abstract

With rapid progress in both computers and networks, real-time multimedia applications are now possible on the Internet. Since the Internet was designed to support traditional applications, multimedia applications on the Internet often suffer from unacceptable delay, jitter and data loss. Among these, data loss has the largest impact on quality. Current techniques that correct packet loss often result in unacceptable delays. In this thesis, we propose a new forward error correction technique for video that compensates for lost packets, while maintaining minimal delay. Our approach transmits a small, low-quality redundant frame after each full-quality primary frame. In the event the primary frame is lost, we display the low-quality frame, rather than display the previous frame or retransmit the primary frame. To evaluate our approach, we simulated the effect of data loss over network and repair the data loss by using the redundancy frame. We conducted user studies to experimentally measure users' opinions on the quality of video streams in the presence of data loss, both with and without our redundancy approach. In addition we analyzed the system overhead incurred by the redundancy. Result of the user study shows that video redundancy can greatly improve the perceptual quality of transmitted video stream in the presence of data loss. The system overhead that redundancy introduces is dependent on the quality of the redundant frames, but a typical redundancy overhead will be approximately 10% that of primary frames alone.


Complete Writeup


Related Publications

Yanlin Liu and Mark Claypool, Video Redundancy - A Best-Effort Solution to Network Data Loss, Technical Demonstration at the ACM Multimedia Conference, Volume 2, Orlando, FL, October 30 - November 5, 1999.

Yanlin Liu and Mark Claypool, Using Redundancy to Repair Video Damaged by Network Data Loss, ACM Multimedia Computing and Networking, San Jose, CA, January 25-27, 2000.

Yanlin Liu and Mark Claypool, Using Redundancy to Repair Video Damaged by Network Data Loss, Technical Report WPI-CS-TR-99-18, Computer Science Department, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, July 1999.