Adaptive video streaming for bandwidth variation with optimum quality

Abstract

Bandwidth scarcity is a common problem faced in video transmission over broadband networks, particularly in wireless medium. It is important to find solutions for that since high bandwidth consuming video applications such as video streaming, video conferencing are of high interest to the broadband and mobile users today. This thesis presents adaptive video streaming based methodology to address the given problem. Adaptive streaming is discussed through transcoding. It is a solution that can be adopted to overcome this problem in any network environment. Conversion of video to a form that has less information so that the resulting data volume is appropriate for streaming over a low bandwidth scenario can be done with transcoding. But the video quality drops due to transcoding. A compromise can be made between the video quality and network delay. Effect on video quality and data volume with the variation of transcoding parameters are analyzed in this research, especially with the temporal scaling parameters. A relationship between the transcoding parameters, the data volume reducing factor and the video quality is obtained through numerical methods. Hence a methodology derived from the numerical method is proposed to achieve an adaptive streaming solution. One of the significant outcomes of this thesis is the video quality measurement mechanism proposed that could be used in the presence of spatial and temporal scaling. This solution presents the best transcoding parameters to achieve optimum quality video in a low bandwidth situation. With that, when there is a large number of users are sharing the network, they could watch a video at a lower, but acceptable quality with no interruption. Keywords – Adaptive stream, Transcode, Video quality, Frame Rate, Quantization