Abstract: Future Media Internet is envisaged to provide the means to share and distribute (advanced) multimedia content and services with superior quality and striking flexibility, in a trusted and personalized way, improving citizens' quality of life, working conditions, edutainment and safety. Based on work that has taken place in projects ICT SEA and ICT OPTIMIX, and the Media Delivery Platforms Cluster of projects, we try to provide the challenges and the way ahead in the area of content adaptation.

Abstract: This paper introduces a prototype test-bed for triggering sensory effects like light, wind, or vibration when presenting audiovisual resources, e.g., a video, to users. The ISO/IEC MPEG is currently standardizing the Sensory Effect Description Language (SEDL) for describing such effects. This language is briefly described in the paper and the testbed that is destined to evaluate the quality of the multimedia experience of users is presented. It consists of a video annotation tool for sensory effects, a corresponding simulation tool, and a real test system. Initial experiments and results on determining the color of light effects from the video content are reported.

Abstract: Virtual worlds (often referred to as 3D3C for 3D visualization & navigation and the 3C’s of Community, Creation and Commerce) integrate existing and emerging (media) technologies (e.g. instant messaging, video, 3D, VR, AI, chat, voice, etc.) that allow for the support of existing and the development of new kinds of networked services. The emergence of virtual worlds as platforms for networked services is recognized by businesses as an important enabler as it offers the power to reshape the way companies interact with their environments (markets, customers, suppliers, creators, stakeholders, etc.) in a fashion comparable to the Internet and to allow for the development of new (breakthrough) business models, services, applications and devices. Each virtual world however has a different culture and audience making use of these specific worlds for a variety of reasons. These differences in existing Metaverses permit users to have unique experiences. In order to bridge these differences in existing and emerging Metaverses a standardized framework is required, i.e., MPEG-V Media Context and Control (ISO/IEC 23005), that will provide a lower entry level to (multiple) virtual worlds both for the provider of goods and services as well as the user. The aim of this paper is to provide an overview of MPEG-V and its intended standardization areas. Additionally, a review about MPEG-V’s most advanced part – Sensory Information – is given.

Abstract: Nowadays, mobile devices have implemented several transmission technologies which enable access to the Internet and increase the bit rate for data exchange. Despite modern mobile processors and high-resolution displays, mobile devices will never reach the stage of a powerful notebook or desktop system (for example, due to the fact of battery powered CPUs or just concerning the smallsized displays). Due to these limitations, the deliverable content for these devices should be adapted based on their capabilities including a variety of aspects (e.g., from terminal to network characteristics). These capabilities should be described in an interoperable way. In practice, however, there are many standards available and a common mapping model between these standards is not in place. Therefore, in this paper we describe such a mapping model and its implementation aspects. In particular, we focus on the whole delivery context (i.e., terminal capabilities, network characteristics, user preferences, etc.) and investigated the two most prominent state-of-the-art description schemes, namely User Agent Profile (UAProf) and Usage Environment Description (UED).

Abstract: We describe an approach for viewing any large, detail-rich picture on a small display by generating a video from the image, as taken by a virtual camera moving across it at varying distance. Our main innovation is the ability to build the virtual camera's motion from a textual description of a picture, e.g., a museum caption, so that relevance and ordering of image regions are determined by co-analyzing image annotations and natural language text. Furthermore, our system arranges the resulting presentation such that it is synchronized with an audio track generated from the text by use of a text-to-speech system.

Abstract: In this paper, we present an approach for presenting large, feature-rich pictures on small displays by generating an animation and subsequently a video from the image, as it could be taken by a virtual camera moving across the image. Our main innovation is the ability to build the virtual camera's motion upon a textual description of a picture, as from a museum caption, so that relevance and ordering of image regions is determined by co-analyzing image annotations and text. Furthermore, our system can arrange the resulting presentation in a way that it is synchronized with an audio track generated from the text by use of a text-to-speech system.

Abstract: Currently, much research aims at coping with the shortcomings in multimedia consumption that may exist in a user's current context, e.g., due to the absence of appropriate devices at many locations, a lack of capabilities of mobile devices, restricted access to content, or non-personalized user interfaces. Recently, solutions to specific problems have been emerging, e.g., wireless access to multimedia repositories over standardized interfaces; however, due to usability restrictions the user has to spend much effort to or is even incapable of fulfilling his/her demands. The vision of user-centric multimedia places the user in the center of multimedia services to support his/her multimedia consumption intelligently, dealing with the aforementioned issues while minimizing required work. Essential features of such a vision are comprehensive context awareness, personalized user interfaces, and multimedia content adaptation. These aspects are addressed in this paper as major challenges toward a user-centric multimedia framework.

Abstract: This paper presents a novel approach that combines both in-network, application-layer adaptation and network-layer traffic control of scalable video streams based on the H.264/SVC standard. In the IPTV/VoD scenario considered, an intercepting RTSP/RTP proxy performs admission control of the requested video, based on the signaled scalability information, and decides whether the content can be streamed without changes or in an adapted version. The proxy configures the network layer appropriately in order to separate the video stream from besteffort traffic on the same link. Rather than performing fixed bandwidth allocation, our proxy approach uses the Hierarchical Token Bucket (HTB) queuing discipline to allow for borrowing bandwidth between traffic classes. In that setting, two different allocation policies are introduced. The Hard Reservation Policy (HRP) performs admission control and adaptation on the video streams and does not modify video bandwidth allocation after admission. In contrast, the Flexible Borrowing Policy (FBP) restricts the admission control to the base layer of the SVC stream. The packets carrying MGS enhancement layer data are marked with priorities by the proxy and are handled at the network layer by a priority-based queuing mechanism. Both a qualitative comparison and an experimental evaluation of the two policies are given.

Abstract: One of the most active research topics in the field of video signal processing is scalable video coding (SVC). The recently published extension of the H.264/AVC video coding standard introduces scalability features by employing a layered encoding of the video stream. In our work we investigated the usage of this scalable extension of H.264/AVC for in-network multimedia adaptation. We developed an RTSP/RTP-based proxy which exploits the layered encoding of the video and can perform real-time video adaptation on an inexpensive off-the-shelf WiFi router. This is achieved by applying a stateful, packet-based adaptation approach that keeps the computational costs at a minimum. With that approach it is possible to simultaneously adapt multiple video streams to varying network conditions or to the capabilities of the consumers' end-devices. In our demonstration we show the streaming of two scalable video streams from a server to a client and the in-network adaptation of the video at the WiFi router. The adaptation can be controlled interactively in the temporal, spatial and SNR domains.

Abstract: This paper addresses the efficient adaptation of encrypted scalable video content (H.264/SVC). RTP-based in-network adaptation schemes on a media aware network element (MANE) in an IPTV and VoD scenario are considered. Two basic alternatives to implement encryption and adaptation of H.264/SVC content are investigated: (i) full, format-independent encryption making use of Secure RTP (SRTP); (ii) SVC-specific encryption that leaves the metadata relevant for adaptation (NAL unit headers) unencrypted. The SRTP-based scheme (i) is straightforward to deploy, but requires the MANE to be in the security context of the delivery, i.e., to be a trusted node. For adaptation, the content needs to be decrypted, scaled, and re-encrypted. The SVC-specific approach (ii) enables both full and selective encryption, e.g., of the base layer only. SVC-specific encryption is based on own previous work, which is substantially extended and detailed in this paper. The adaptation MANE can now be an untrusted node; adaptation becomes a low-complexity process, avoiding full decryption and re-encryption of the content. This paper presents the first experimental comparison of these two approaches and evaluates whether multimedia-specific encryption can lead to performance and application benefits. Potential security threats and security properties of the two approaches in the IPTV and VoD scenario are elementarily analyzed. In terms of runtime performance on the MANE our SVC-specific encryption scheme significantly outperforms the SRTP-based approach. SVC-specific encryption is also superior in terms of induced end-to-end delays. The performance can even be improved by selective application of the SVC-specific encryption scheme. The results indicate that efficient adaptation of SVC-encrypted content on low-end, untrusted network devices is feasible.

Abstract: In this paper, an interoperable framework for the delivery of scalable media resources, e.g., in the standardized Scalable Video Coding (SVC) format, is presented. The framework provides support for Video on Demand (VoD) as well as multicast streaming and performs an efficient, generic, and interoperable adaptation of the streamed content based on MPEG-21 Digital Item Adaptation (DIA). The server as well as the clients of the streaming framework implement the MPEG Extensible Middleware (MXM) and utilize the MPEG Query Format (MPQF) for querying the available media resources. The framework has been fully integrated into the VLC media player. The architecture for both, VoD and multicast is presented in detail. Finally, a comparison in terms of performance of the generic MPEG-21 metadata-based adaptation approach to an SVC-specific adaptation approach is provided.

Abstract: The streaming of multimedia content over Peer-to-Peer (P2P) networks is nowadays a well appreciated concept, as it helps distributing content to a great number of users and additionally reduces the server costs for providing the content. As the users of P2P networks often have different bandwidth connections and terminals, the same content is usually provided in different qualities. Although such a provision of the same content in different qualities helps to satisfy all users, it makes the sharing process less efficient. Users that are interested in the content in a specific quality can only exchange pieces with those users that are interested in the same content and the same quality. Thus, layered video coding, which provides different qualities within one bitstream, is especially well suited for P2P distribution. If the layered content is provided once in the best quality, all peers interested in this content can at least exchange the base layer, plus the enhancement layers they are interested in with those peers that have them available.