Optimized Adaptive Streaming of Multi-video Stream Bundles
Niklas Carlsson, Derek Eager, Vengatanathan Krishnamoorthi, and Tatiana Polishchuk
Paper:
Niklas Carlsson, Derek Eager, Vengatanathan Krishnamoorthi, and Tatiana Polishchuk,
"Optimized Adaptive Streaming of Multi-video Stream Bundles",
IEEE Transactions on Multimedia (IEEE TMM),
to appear.
(pdf)
Abstract:
In contrast to traditional video, multi-view video
streaming allows viewers to interactively switch among multiple
perspectives provided by different cameras. One approach to
achieving such a service is to encode the video from all of the
cameras into a single stream, but this has the disadvantage that
only a portion of the received video data will be used, namely
that required for the selected view at each point in time. In
this paper we introduce the concept of a "multi-video stream bundle"
that consists of multiple parallel video streams that are
synchronized in time, each providing the video from a different
camera capturing the same event or movie. For delivery we
leverage the adaptive features and time-based chunking of HTTP-based
Adaptive Streaming (HAS), but now employing adaptation
in both content and rate. Users are able to change their viewpoint
on-demand and the client player adapts the rate at which data is
retrieved from each stream based on the user’s current view, the
probabilities of switching to other views, and the user's current
bandwidth conditions. A crucial component of such a system is the
prefetching policy. For this we present an optimization model as
well as a simpler heuristic that can balance the playback quality
and the probability of playback interruptions. After analytically
and numerically characterizing the optimal solution, we present
a prototype implementation and sample results. Our prefetching
and buffer management solution is shown to provide close to
seamless playback switching when there is sufficient bandwidth
to prefetch the parallel streams.
Software
The software and code used in our paper is available
here (14 MB)
for use by the wider research community.
Please refer to our paper above
for a description of the different components and the experimental setup.
(The file contains commented source codes and a
README file which should help in getting started with the files.)
Note: If you use our datafiles and/or software in your research,
please include a reference to our IEEE Transactions on Multimedia (IEEE TMM) 2017 paper
(pdf) in your work.