Technique to enable efficient adaptive streaming and transcoding of video and other signals

摘要

A method is described for efficiently determining total end-to-end distortion of a pre-compressed data stream, such as video streams or other media streams, at the time of delivery over a lossy-network, and for providing adaptive error-resilient delivery schemes based on distortion estimates. The methods can be utilized with single or multilayer packet streams and are particularly well suited for video streams. By way of example, distortion estimates are performed by generating side-information at the time of data stream compression, wherein the side-information is used in conjunction with information about the network status to determine an estimated distortion for the group of packets when the data stream is transported over the network to a destination end. This estimation may be utilized within described resiliency techniques in which the error correction mechanism is selected in response to the estimated distortion, which may be additionally refined in reference to cost factors.

主权项

1. A method of adaptive delivery of pre-compressed data over a network, comprising:
(a) receiving actual network status information from a network; (b) determining end-to-end distortion for a pre-compressed data stream based on said actual network status information received for said network and side-information generated about said data stream generated while the original uncompressed source data was still available; (c) selecting an error correction scheme, from a range or set of error correction schemes based on achieving a desired tradeoff between end-to-end distortion and transport cost; and (d) transmitting said pre-compressed data stream with said selected error correction over said network; (e) wherein said network status is only known at the time of delivery of said pre-compressed data stream; (f) wherein said network status information comprises packet loss information; and (g) wherein the end-to-end distortion, denoted by EP(Π){D}, is determined according to the relationEP_⁢{D}+∑i=0N-1⁢γi⁢Δ⁢⁢pi⁡(π1),wherein EP{D} is the reference distortion, γi is the first-order partial derivative, pi is the difference in packet loss rates between actual packet loss and reference packet loss value utilized for generating selected reference distortion value.