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Register a new userEfficient Bitrate Ladder Construction for Content-Optimized Adaptive Video Streaming
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Added by
Angeliki Katsenou Dr
Publication date
2021
fields
Electronic Engineering
and research's language is
English
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One of the challenges faced by many video providers is the heterogeneity of network specifications, user requirements, and content compression performance. The universal solution of a fixed bitrate ladder is inadequate in ensuring a high quality of user experience without re-buffering or introducing annoying compression artifacts. However, a content-tailored solution, based on extensively encoding across all resolutions and over a wide quality range is highly expensive in terms of computational, financial, and energy costs. Inspired by this, we propose an approach that exploits machine learning to predict a content-optimized bitrate ladder. The method extracts spatio-temporal features from the uncompressed content, trains machine-learning models to predict the Pareto front parameters, and, based on that, builds the ladder within a defined bitrate range. The method has the benefit of significantly reducing the number of encodes required per sequence. The presented results, based on 100 HEVC-encoded sequences, demonstrate a reduction in the number of encodes required when compared to an exhaustive search and an interpolation-based method, by 89.06% and 61.46%, respectively, at the cost of an average Bj{o}ntegaard Delta Rate difference of 1.78% compared to the exhaustive approach. Finally, a hybrid method is introduced that selects either the proposed or the interpolation-based method depending on the sequence features. This results in an overall 83.83% reduction of required encodings at the cost of an average Bj{o}ntegaard Delta Rate difference of 1.26%.
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The diversity of video delivery pipeline poses a grand challenge to the evaluation of adaptive bitrate (ABR) streaming algorithms and objective quality-of-experience (QoE) models. Here we introduce so-far the largest subject-rated database of its kind, namely WaterlooSQoE-IV, consisting of 1350 adaptive streaming videos created from diverse source contents, video encoders, network traces, ABR algorithms, and viewing devices. We collect human opinions for each video with a series of carefully designed subjective experiments. Subsequent data analysis and testing/comparison of ABR algorithms and QoE models using the database lead to a series of novel observations and interesting findings, in terms of the effectiveness of subjective experiment methodologies, the interactions between user experience and source content, viewing device and encoder type, the heterogeneities in the bias and preference of user experiences, the behaviors of ABR algorithms, and the performance of objective QoE models. Most importantly, our results suggest that a better objective QoE model, or a better understanding of human perceptual experience and behaviour, is the most dominating factor in improving the performance of ABR algorithms, as opposed to advanced optimization frameworks, machine learning strategies or bandwidth predictors, where a majority of ABR research has been focused on in the past decade. On the other hand, our performance evaluation of 11 QoE models shows only a moderate correlation between state-of-the-art QoE models and subjective ratings, implying rooms for improvement in both QoE modeling and ABR algorithms. The database is made publicly available at: url{https://ece.uwaterloo.ca/~zduanmu/waterloosqoe4/}.
Adaptive bitrate (ABR) streaming is the de facto solution for achieving smooth viewing experiences under unstable network conditions. However, most of the existing rate adaptation approaches for ABR are content-agnostic, without considering the semantic information of the video content. Nevertheless, semantic information largely determines the informativeness and interestingness of the video content, and consequently affects the QoE for video streaming. One common case is that the user may expect higher quality for the parts of video content that are more interesting or informative so as to reduce video distortion and information loss, given that the overall bitrate budgets are limited. This creates two main challenges for such a problem: First, how to determine which parts of the video content are more interesting? Second, how to allocate bitrate budgets for different parts of the video content with different significances? To address these challenges, we propose a Content-of-Interest (CoI) based rate adaptation scheme for ABR. We first design a deep learning approach for recognizing the interestingness of the video content, and then design a Deep Q-Network (DQN) approach for rate adaptation by incorporating video interestingness information. The experimental results show that our method can recognize video interestingness precisely, and the bitrate allocation for ABR can be aligned with the interestingness of video content while not compromising the performances on objective QoE metrics.
Recently, learning based video compression methods attract increasing attention. However, the previous works suffer from error propagation due to the accumulation of reconstructed error in inter predictive coding. Meanwhile, the previous learning based video codecs are also not adaptive to different video contents. To address these two problems, we propose a content adaptive and error propagation aware video compression system. Specifically, our method employs a joint training strategy by considering the compression performance of multiple consecutive frames instead of a single frame. Based on the learned long-term temporal information, our approach effectively alleviates error propagation in reconstructed frames. More importantly, instead of using the hand-crafted coding modes in the traditional compression systems, we design an online encoder updating scheme in our system. The proposed approach updates the parameters for encoder according to the rate-distortion criterion but keeps the decoder unchanged in the inference stage. Therefore, the encoder is adaptive to different video contents and achieves better compression performance by reducing the domain gap between the training and testing datasets. Our method is simple yet effective and outperforms the state-of-the-art learning based video codecs on benchmark datasets without increasing the model size or decreasing the decoding speed.
Increasing the frame rate of a 3D video generally results in improved Quality of Experience (QoE). However, higher frame rates involve a higher degree of complexity in capturing, transmission, storage, and display. The question that arises here is what frame rate guarantees high viewing quality of experience given the existing/required 3D devices and technologies (3D cameras, 3D TVs, compression, transmission bandwidth, and storage capacity). This question has already been addressed for the case of 2D video, but not for 3D. The objective of this paper is to study the relationship between 3D quality and bitrate at different frame rates. Our performance evaluations show that increasing the frame rate of 3D videos beyond 60 fps may not be visually distinguishable. In addition, our experiments show that when the available bandwidth is reduced, the highest possible 3D quality of experience can be achieved by adjusting (decreasing) the frame rate instead of increasing the compression ratio. The results of our study are of particular interest to network providers for rate adaptation in variable bitrate channels.
Adaptive streaming addresses the increasing and heterogenous demand of multimedia content over the Internet by offering several encod
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