Transmission of scalable video bitstreams over internet using BSDL descriptions

Abstract

With the rapid development of broadband internet, video streaming is becoming the dominant internet application. In order to transmit video streams over the network with a timely changing channel bandwidth such as Internet, scalable video coding schemes have been studied to represent video in flexible bitstream. Much research has been made on how to represent encoded video bitstream in scalable ways. One of such efforts is the FGS (Fine Granular Scalability) video coding technique. However, less focus has been put on maximally transmitting FGS based video bitstreams over Internet a timely changing channel bandwidth in an effective way. In this study, we propose an FGS based video transmission control method using the BSDL (bitstream syntax description language) in MPEG-21 DIA (digital item adaptation) for maximum transmission over the Internet. We use the BSDL description to fast access the FGS video bitstream when the video streams are packetized for transmission over the Internet. We implemented a streaming system that maximally transmits an FGS based video bitstream instantaneously over the Internet. The PSNR values were measured on the reconstructed video after decoding. The experiment results show that the transmission maximization is successfully made and yielded enhanced visual quality of about 3dB for simulated channel environment.