CRI: CRD: VIDEO TRACES II - Designing, Creating, and Disseminating Video Traces for Networking Research

Arizona State University, Scottsdale AZ

Investigators

Abstract

A number of new developments in video coding and networking are dramatically changing multimedia networking, including: (i) HDTV resolution video transmission over IP networks, (ii) fundamentally new scalable coding paradigms introduced with the scalability extensions of the H.264/AVC (Advanced Video Coding) codec, (iii) novel error resilience techniques, and (iv) the UMA (Universal Media Access) paradigm, which allows for unprecedented flexibility in content characterization and adaptivity in video transport. These new coding techniques open a vast research and development space for novel video transport mechanisms and make possible groundbreaking advances over existing mechanisms. To enable the exploration of this research space we (a) design trace characterizations of the new video coding paradigms, (b) create and disseminate an extensive publicly available library of video traces for these new codec developments, (c) conduct statistical analyses of the video traffic and quality and the video content features captured in the traces and (d) formulate usage guidelines for the trace library. The intellectual merit of this community resource development project is the design of trace characterizations capturing the traffic, quality, and content features of video up to HDTV resolution coded with the new scalability, error-resilience, and UMA paradigms in video traces. The provision of both these traces and of the statistical analysis of the traffic, quality, and content characteristics will inform and advance networking, systems and video research. The broader impact is provision of these sophisticated traces and analytical results in free and publicly available form. In particular, this video trace library allows the networking research community to keep pace with the developments in the video coding area and provides traces that reflect the properties of the video codings that will dominate the future Internet and wireless networks. The video trace library and the accompanying trace usage guidelines/tutorials enable and educate networking researchers without deep video coding expertise and/or without up-to-date equipment to conduct timely, high-quality research on a wide range of critical multimedia networking projects and hence to expand the research base.