Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP: From Content Creation to Consumption

This is the tutorial presentation during this years' ACM Multimedia 2012 presented by myself and Carsten Griwodz from Simula Research, Norway.

Abstract: In this tutorial we present dynamic adaptive streaming over HTTP ranging from content creation to consumption. It particular, it provides an overview of the recently ratified MPEG-DASH standard, how to create content to be delivered using DASH, its consumption, and the evaluation thereof with respect to competing industry solutions. The tutorial can be roughly clustered into three parts. In part I we will provide an introduction to DASH, part II covers content creation, delivery, and consumption, and, finally, part III deals with the evaluation of existing (open source) MPEG-DASH implementations compared to state-of-art deployed industry solutions.

Acknowledgment: FP7 ICT SocialSensor, FP7 ICT ALICANTE

MPEG news: a report from the 102nd meeting, Shanghai, China

The 102nd MPEG meeting was held in Shanghai, China, October 15-19, 2012. The official press release can be found here (not yet available) and I would like to highlight the following topics:

• Augmented Reality Application Format (ARAF) goes DIS
• MPEG-4 has now 30 parts: Let's welcome timed text and other visual overlays
• Draft call for proposals for 3D audio 
• Green MPEG is progressing
• MPEG starts a new publicity campaign by making more working documents publicly available for free

Augmented Reality Application Format (ARAF) goes DIS

MPEG's application format dealing with augmented reality reached DIS status and is only one step away from becoming in international standard. In a nutshell, the MPEG ARAF enables to augment 2D/3D regions of scene by combining multiple/existing standards within a specific application format addressing certain industry needs. In particular, ARAF comprises three components referred to as scene, sensor/actuator, and media. The scene component is represented using a subset of MPEG-4 Part 11 (BIFS), the sensor/actuator component is defined within MPEG-V, and the media component may comprise various type of compressed (multi)media assets using different sorts of modalities and codecs.

A tutorial from Marius Preda, MPEG 3DG chair, at the Web3D conference in August 2012 is provided below.

MPEG Augmented Reality Tutorial from Marius Preda

MPEG-4 has now 30 parts

Let's welcome timed text and other visual overlays in the family of MPEG-4 standards. Part 30 of MPEG-4 - in combination with an amendment to the ISO base media file format (ISOBMFF) -  addresses the carriage of W3C TTML including its derivative SMPTE Timed Text, as well as WebVTT. The types of overlays include subtitles, captions, and other timed text and graphics. The text-based overlays include basic text and XML-based text. Additionally, the standards provides support for bitmaps, fonts, and other graphics formats such as scalable vector graphics.

Draft call for proposals for 3D audio

MPEG 3D audio is concerned about various test items ranging from 9.1 over 12.1 up to 22.1 channel configurations. A public draft call for proposals has been issued at this meeting with the goal to finalize the call and the evaluation guidelines at the next meeting. The evaluation will be conducted in two phases. Phase one for higher bitrates (1.5 Mbps to 265 kbps) is foreseen to conclude in July 2013 with the evaluation of the answers to the call and the selection of the "Reference Model 0 (RM0)" technology which will serve as a basis for the development of an 3D audio standard. The second phase targets lower bitrates (96 kbps to 48 kbps) and builds on RM0 technology after this has been documented using text and code.

Green MPEG is progressing

The idea between green MPEG is to define signaling means that enable energy efficient encoding, delivery, decoding, and/or presentation of MPEG formats (and possibly others) without the loss of Quality of Experience. Green MPEG will address this issue from an end-to-end point of view with the focus - as usual - on the decoder. However, a codec-centric design is not desirable as the energy efficiency should not be affected at the expenses of the other components of the media ecosystem. At the moment, first requirements have been defined and everyone is free to join the discussions on the email reflector within the Ad-hoc Group.

MPEG starts a new publicity campaign by making more working documents publicly available for free

As a response to national bodies comments, MPEG is starting from now on to make more documents publicly available for free. Here's a selection of these documents which are publicly available here. Note that some may have an editing period and, thus, are not available at the of writing this blog post.

• Text of ISO/IEC 14496-15:2010/DAM 2 Carriage of HEVC (2012/11/02)
• Text of ISO/IEC CD 14496-30 Timed Text and Other Visual Overlays in ISO Base Media File Format (2012/11/02)
• DIS of ISO/IEC 23000-13, Augmented Reality Application Format (2012/11/07)
• DTR of ISO/IEC 23000-14, Augmented reality reference model (2012/11/21)
• Study of ISO/IEC CD 23008-1 MPEG Media Transport (2012/11/12)
• High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) Test Model 9 (HM 9) Encoder Description (2012/11/30)
• Study Text of ISO/IEC DIS 23008-2 High Efficiency Video Coding (2012/11/30)
• Working Draft of HEVC Full Range Extensions (2012/11/02)
• Working Draft of HEVC Conformance (2012/11/02)
• Report of Results of the Joint Call for Proposals on Scalable High Efficiency Video Coding (SHVC) (2012/11/09)
• Draft Call for Proposals on 3D Audio (2012/10/19)
• Text of ISO/IEC 23009-1:2012 DAM 1 Support for Event Messages and Extended Audio Channel Configuration (2012/10/31)
• Internet Video Coding Test Model (ITM) v 3.0 (2012/11/02)
• Draft Requirements on MPEG User Descriptions (2012/10/19)
• Draft Use Cases for MPEG User Description (Ver. 4.0) (2012/10/19)
• Requirements on Green MPEG (2012/10/19)
• White Paper on State of the Art in compression and transmission of 3D Video (Draft) (2012/10/19)
• White Paper on Compact Descriptors for Visual Search (2012/11/09)

QUALINET Newslet Vol.2 2012: "The Quest for a Definition of Quality of Experience"

Qualinet Newslet is a newletter that appears twice a year and which is published by the COST Action IC 1003, European Network on Quality of Experience in Multimedia Systems and Services. The Newslet can be downloaded from Qualinet‘s web site http://www.qualinet.eu.

Qualinet Coordinators: Touradj Ebrahimi (EPFL), Andrew Perkis (NTNU)
Editor-in-Chief: Klaus Diepold (TUM), kldi@tum.de

Table of contents:

The Quest for a Definition of Quality of Experience
A background report on Qualinet‘s effort to define the term „Quality of Experience“
Klaus Diepold

Report: Summer School on Quality Assessment in Illmenau
Kristina Kunze 

Recent PhD theses

• On Perception-Based Error Protection for Mobile Multimedia
  Muhammad Imran Iqbal
• Estimating Spoken Dialog System Quality with User Models
  Klaus-Peter Engelbrecht
• Selected Contributions on Multimedia Quality Evaluation
  Francesca De Simone

Bookshelf: Book titles related to QoE, recommended by Qualinet members for Qualinet members

The newsletter is available here.

Qualinet White Paper on Definitions of Quality of Experience

Preface [PDF]:

This White Paper is a contribution of the European Network on Quality of Experience in Multimedia Systems and Services, Qualinet (COST Action IC 1003, see www.qualinet.eu), to the scientific discussion about the term “Quality of Experience” (QoE) and its underlying concepts. It resulted from the need to agree on a working definition  for this term  which facilitates the communication of ideas within a multidisciplinary group, where a joint interest around multimedia communication systems exists, however approached from different perspectives. Thus, the concepts and ideas cited in this paper mainly refer to the Quality of Experience of multimedia communication systems, but may be helpful also for other areas where QoE is an issue.

The Network of Excellence (NoE) Qualinet aims at extending the notion of network-centric Quality of Service (QoS) in multimedia systems, by relying on the concept of Quality of Experience (QoE). The main scientific objective is the development of methodologies for subjective and objective quality metrics taking into account current and new trends in multimedia communication systems as witnessed by the appearance of new types of content and interactions. A substantial scientific impact on fragmented efforts carried out in this field will be achieved by coordinating the research of European experts under the catalytic COST umbrella.

The White Paper has been compiled on the basis of a first open call for ideas which was launched for the February 2012 Qualinet Meeting held in Prague, Czech Republic. The ideas were presented as short statements during  that meeting, reflecting the ideas of the persons listed under the headline “Contributors” in the previous section. During the Prague meeting, the ideas have been further discussed and consolidated in the form of a general structure of the present document. An open call for authors was issued at that meeting, to which the persons listed as “Authors” in the previous section have announced their willingness to contribute in the preparation of individual sections. For each section, a coordinating author has been assigned which coordinated the writing of that section, and which is underlined in the author list preceding each section. The individual sections were then integrated and aligned by an editing group (listed as “Editors” in the previous section), and the entire document was iterated with the entire group of authors. Furthermore, the draft text was discussed with the participants of the Dagstuhl Seminar 12181 “Quality of Experience: From User Perception to Instrumental Metrics” which was held in Schloß Dagstuhl, Germany, May 1-4 2012, and a number of changes were proposed, resulting in the present document.

As a result of the writing process and the large number of contributors, authors and editors, the document will not reflect the opinion of each individual person at all points. Still, we hope that it is found to be useful for everybody working in the field of Quality of Experience of multimedia communication systems, and most probably also beyond that field.

Any comments or suggestions should be sent to the editors:

Sebastian.Moeller@telekom.de
Patrick.Le-Callet@univ-nantes.fr
andrew@iet.ntnu.no

Please, refer to the paper as follows:

"Qualinet White Paper on Definitions of Quality of Experience (2012). European Network on Quality of Experience in Multimedia Systems and Services (COST Action IC 1003), Patrick Le Callet, Sebastian Möller and Andrew Perkis, eds., Lausanne, Switzerland, Version 1.1, June 3, 2012."

Find the .pdf here

Computing Now: Call for Monthly Theme Issues

Call for Monthly Theme Issues [PDF]

Computing Now, a front-end online portal to IEEE Computer Society publications, publishes information about the most recent technical innovations, news and events, with a short turnaround time. As an online entity, it is ideally suited for multimedia, podcasts, Web pages, and Web services, enabling a dynamic and interactive user experience.

Computing Now seeks proposals for Monthly Theme Issues surveying topics of interest to the technical community. Monthly Themes are short surveys of technical areas, accompanied by papers from IEEE CS publications. Themes are curated by Guest Editors and consist of:

• An introduction (1000 words maximum) written by the Guest Editor, briefly describing the topic space (state of the art, open challenges, potentials) and including a sentence or two on each article in the theme
• 4 or 5 recent articles, selected by the Guest Editor, from a minimum of 2–3 different IEEE Computer Society publications (magazines, journals, or conference proceedings) published by the IEEE CS and viable in the IEEE CS Digital Library (www.computer.org/csdl). These papers will be freely accessible for two months on CN; thereafter, they will be available for purchase through the CS Digital Library
• (highly recommended, but not mandatory) A short (5 min maximum) audio-video taped “Industrial Perspective” statement, from a representative of a Company leader in the field of the issue. The statement should be a brief position-statement on the topic (perspective, open problems, etc).
• (highly recommended, but not mandatory) Additional multimedia content, such as video, audio recordings, etc,. produced by the Guest Editor(s).

Guest Editors interested in organizing a Monthly Theme are invited to submit a proposal to the Editor In Chief at computing_now@computer.org. This proposal should include the following information:

• Proposed Title
• Background and Motivation
• Relevance to Computing Now and to the IEEE Computer Society
• List of related IEEE CS publications and specific technical issues
• Guest Editor(s) Short biographies, highlighting experience in the topic and editorial experience Proposed Company Representative for the Industrial Perspective statement (recommended)
• Proposed Publication Month

If the proposal is accepted, the Editor-In-Chief will schedule the theme for a specific month, according to the Guest Editor requests and to the Computing Now calendar. A Computing Now Staff Editor will serve as a liaison to the Guest Editor(s), providing help and advice.

For further information please contact Steve Woods, Manager, New Media and Production, at: swoods@computer.org


Computing Now Editor-in-Chief:

• Cecilia Metra (From January 2013), University of Bologna (Bologna, Italy) Email: cecilia.metra@unibo.it
• Dejan Milojicic (Till January 2013), HP Labs (San Josè, CA, USA) Email: dejan.milojicic@hp.com