EURASIP Journal on Advances in Signal Processing
Volume 2007 (2007), Article ID 47921, 10 pages
doi:10.1155/2007/47921
Research Article

A Complexity-Aware Video Adaptation Mechanism for Live Streaming Systems

Meng-Ting Lu,1 Jason J. Yao,1 and Homer H. Chen2

1Department of Electrical Engineering, Graduate Institute of Communication Engineering, National Taiwan University, Taipei 10617, Taiwan
2Department of Electrical Engineering, Graduate Institute of Communication Engineering, and Graduate Institute of Networking and Multimedia, National Taiwan University, Taipei 10617, Taiwan

Received 3 October 2006; Accepted 21 March 2007

Academic Editor: Alex Kot

Copyright © 2007 Meng-Ting Lu et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

The paradigm shift of network design from performance-centric to constraint-centric has called for new signal processing techniques to deal with various aspects of resource-constrained communication and networking. In this paper, we consider the computational constraints of a multimedia communication system and propose a video adaptation mechanism for live video streaming of multiple channels. The video adaptation mechanism includes three salient features. First, it adjusts the computational resource of the streaming server block by block to provide a fine control of the encoding complexity. Second, as far as we know, it is the first mechanism to allocate the computational resource to multiple channels. Third, it utilizes a complexity-distortion model to determine the optimal coding parameter values to achieve global optimization. These techniques constitute the basic building blocks for a successful application of wireless and Internet video to digital home, surveillance, IPTV, and online games.