An Interactive Video Streaming Architecture Featuring Bitrate Adaptation

Fernandez, Ivan Alen [UCL] De Vleeschouwer, Christophe [UCL] Toma, George [FUNDP] Schumacher, Laurent [FUNDP]

This paper describes an interactive and adaptive streaming architecture that exploits temporal concatenation of H.264/AVC video bit-streams to dynamically adapt to both user commands and network conditions. The architecture has been designed to improve the viewing experience when accessing video content through individual and potentially bandwidth constrained connections. On the one hand, the user commands typically gives the client the opportunity to select interactively a preferred version among the multiple video clips that are made available to render the scene, e.g. using different view angles, or zoomed-in and slow-motion factors. On the other hand, the adaptation to the network bandwidth ensures effective management of the client buffer, which appears to be fundamental to reduce the client-server interaction latency, while maximizing video quality and preventing buffer underflow. In addition to user interaction and network adaptation, the deployment of fully autonomous infrastructures for interactive content distribution also requires the development of automatic versioning methods. Hence, the paper also surveys a number of approaches proposed for this purpose in surveillance and sport event contexts. Both objective metrics and subjective experiments are exploited to assess our system.