VideoVoyage: an efficient multi-scale navigable codec for video viewing

Abstract

VideoVoyage is a navigable video viewing system that allows interactive zooming or translation of the camera. A user specifies a region of interest from a high-resolution incoming video stream. Then, the requested region can be interactively sent over through the network for intended inspection in the client side. This becomes possible by a novel region-based encoding and decoding techniques that are performed on the server and client, respectively. First, in the encoding side, Huffman coding is parallelized on the GPU. Second, an additional Huffman coding is performed on the CPU to expedite the decoding process on the client. In the decoding side, a forward bit scan operation is used on the CPU to eciently decode and scan the encoded data from the server. Next, the De Bruijin process is performed on the GPU to decode the video a second time. With VideoVoyage, the entire or any region of a Ultra High Resolution Video can be viewed as requested. The experiment results show that our codec can perform in real-time under the bandwidth of 1080KBit/s.