STreamingDay 2008, Sep. 2, Parma, Italy

At this year’s StreamingDay – kindly hosted by University of Parma – we saw a lot of interesting presentations related to video coding (AVC, reconfigurable coding, etc.), streaming, adaptation, cross-layer optimizations, peer-to-peer, robustness, and quality monitoring (see the final program for details). With this blog entry I’d like to briefly summarize the highlights of this event.

The first session was extremely hardware-oriented where they’re aiming at efficient multimedia implementations (i.e., mainly AVC encoding but also general purpose signal processing) for the ST240 VLIW processor. The overall goal is to allow for real-time encoding of HD (1080p) content which opens the door to a punch of applications.

The second session was dedicated to streaming, adaptation, and optimization issues. Michael presented our joint work (with ST) in this session (see picture). Overall, the feedback was quite good but the overhead issue is still omnipresent. In any case, the optimized reference software implementation (note: of SVC’s bitstream extractor) provides the lower boundary of what can be practically achieved.

The last session was related P2P, robustness, and quality monitoring. The P2P presentation was a good overview of P2P systems for live video streaming. In this work the authors proposed a combination of MDC and SVC for streaming of live video in P2P systems which results in higher coding efficiency and robustness but at which costs (performance and overhead)?

Conclusion: the STreamingDay is a very nice event organized by ST and related universities and you may hear a lot about the newest trends regarding streaming, coding, and applications, also from an industry perspective... hope to see you next year.