DASH-IF awarded Grand Challenge on Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP at IEEE ICME 2018

July 25, ICME 2018, San Diego, CA, USA

DASH-IF awarded Grand Challenge on Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP at IEEE ICME 2018

http://dashif.org/

Real-time entertainment services such as streaming video and audio are currently accounting for more than 70% of the Internet traffic during peak hours. Interestingly, these services are all delivered over-the-top (OTT) of the existing networking infrastructure using HTTP. The MPEG Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (DASH) standard enables smooth multimedia streaming towards heterogeneous devices.

The MPEG DASH standard provides an interoperable representation format but deliberately does not define the adaptation behavior for the client implementations, which is left open for research and industry competition. In a typical deployment, the encoding itself is optimized for the respective delivery channels but - as the content is delivered over the top without any guarantees - various issues during the streaming (e.g., high startup delay, stalls/re-buffering, high switching frequency, inefficient network utilization, unfairness to competing network traffic, etc.) may limit the quality of experience (QoE) as perceived by the viewers.

The aim of this grand challenge is to solicit contributions addressing end-to-end delivery aspects that will help improve the QoE while optimally using the network resources at an acceptable cost. Such aspects include, but are not limited to, content preparation for adaptive streaming, delivery in the Internet and streaming client implementations.

A special focus of 2018’s grand challenge will be related to immersive media applications and services including omnidirectional/360-degree videos.

The winner will be awarded  €750 and the runner-up €250.

Each submission has been presented at IEEE ICME 2017 within an oral session, which was attended very well.

  
(photos by C. Timmerer)

This year's award goes to the following papers:

WINNER: "Game Theory Based Bitrate Adaptation for dash.js Reference Player" by Abdelhak Bentaleb, Ali Begen, Roger Zimmermann

Christian Timmerer (left), Abdelhak Bentaleb, Vasudev Bhaskaran, Lei Zhang.

RUNNER-UP: "Tile-based QoE-driven HTTP/2 Streaming System for 360 Video" by Zhimin Xu, Yixuan Ban, Kai Zhang, Lan Xie, Xinggong Zhang, Zongming Guo, Shengbin Meng, Yue Wang

Christian Timmerer (left), Zongming Guo, Vasudev Bhaskaran, Lei Zhang.

We would like to congratulate all winners. 

DASH-IF awarded Grand Challenge on Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP at IEEE ICME 2017

Hong Kong, July 12, 2017

Real-time entertainment services such as streaming video and audio are currently accounting for more than 70% of the Internet traffic during peak hours. Interestingly, these services are all delivered over-the-top (OTT) of the existing networking infrastructure using the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP). The MPEG Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (DASH) standard enables smooth multimedia streaming towards heterogeneous devices.

The aim of the DASH-IF Grand Challenge on Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP at IEEE ICME 2017 is to solicit contributions addressing end-to-end delivery aspects that will help improve the QoE while optimally using the network resources at an acceptable cost. Such aspects include, but are not limited to, content preparation for adaptive streaming, delivery in the Internet and streaming client implementations. A special focus of 2017’s grand challenge will be related to virtual reality applications and services including 360 degree videos.

We received the following submissions, which have been evaluated by DASH-IF members:

• "Content Preparation and Cross-Device Delivery of 360° Video with 4k Field of View Using DASH" by Louay Bassbouss, Stefan Pham, Stephan Steglich, Martin Lasak
• "A Hybrid P2P/Multi-Source Quality-Adaptive Live-Streaming Solution for high end-user's QoE" by Joachim Bruneau-Queyreix, Mathias Lacaud, Daniel Negru
• "Efficient content preparation and distribution of 360VR sequences using MPEG-DASH technology" by Cesar Diaz, Julian Cabrera, Marta Orduna, Lara Munoz, Pablo Perex, Narciso Garcia
• "Optimal Viewport Adaptive Streaming for 360-Degree Videos" by Zhimin Xu, Lan Xie, Xinggong Zhang, Han Hu, Yixuan Ban, Zongming Guo

The winner will be awarded  €750 and the runner-up €250.

Each submission has been presented at IEEE ICME 2017 within an oral session, which was attended very well. We've also seen interesting demos after all submissions have been presented.

 

This year's award goes to the following papers:

WINNER: "A Hybrid P2P/Multi-Source Quality-Adaptive Live-Streaming Solution for high end-user's QoE" by Joachim Bruneau-Queyreix, Mathias Lacaud, Daniel Negru

C. Timmerer (left), Joachim Bruneau-Queyreix (middle), Axel Becker-Lakus (right)

RUNNER-UP: "Optimal Viewport Adaptive Streaming for 360-Degree Videos" by Zhimin Xu, Lan Xie, Xinggong Zhang, Han Hu, Yixuan Ban, Zongming Guo

C. Timmerer (left), Zongming Guo (middle), Axel Becker-Lakus (right)

We would like to congratulate all winners and hope seeing you next year at IEEE ICME 2018.

Photos by Cigdem Turan (PolyU, Hong Kong).

Real-Time Entertainment now accounts for >70% of the Internet Traffic

Sandvine's Global Internet Phenomena Report (December 2015 edition) reveals that real-time entertainment (i.e., streaming video and audio) traffic now accounts for more than 70% of North American downstream traffic in the peak evening hours on fixed access networks (see Figure 1). Interestingly, five years ago it accounted only for less than 35%.

Netflix is mainly responsible for this with a share of >37% (i.e., more than the total five years ago) but already had a big share in 2011 (~32%) and didn't "improve" that much. Second biggest share is coming from YouTube with roughly 18%.

I'm using these figures within my slides to motivate that streaming video and audio is a huge market - opening a lot of opportunities for research and innovation - and it's interesting to see how the Internet is being used. In most of these cases, the Internet is used as is, without any bandwidth guarantees and clients adapt themselves to what's available in terms of bandwidth. Service providers offer the content in multiple versions (e.g., different bitrates, resolution, etc.) and each version is segmented to which clients can adapt both at the beginning and also during the session. This principle is known as over-the-top adaptive video streaming and a standardized representation format is available known as Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (DASH) under ISO/IEC 23009. Note that the adaptation logic is not part of the standard and open a punch of possibilities in terms of research and engineering.

Both Netflix and YouTube adopted the DASH format which is now natively supported by modern Web browsers thanks to the HTML5 Media Source Extensions (MSE) and even digital rights management is possible due to Encrypted Media Extensions (EME). All one needs is a client implementation that is compliant to the standard - the easy part; the standard is freely available - and adapts to the dynamically changing usage context while maximizing the Quality of Experience (QoE) - the difficult part. That's why we at bitmovin thought to setup a grand challenge at IEEE ICME 2016 in Seattle, USA with the aim to solicit contributions addressing end-to-end delivery aspects which improve the QoE while optimally utilising the available network infrastructures and its associated costs. This includes the content preparation for DASH, the content delivery within existing networks, and the client implementations. Please feel free to contribute to this exciting problem and if you have further questions or comments, please contact us here.

Multimedia Grand Challenge - Call for Participation

http://www.multimediagrandchallenge.com/
ACM Multimedia 2010
October 25-29th 2010, Firenze, Italy
http://www.acmmm10.org
*****************************************************************************
What problems do Google, Yahoo!, HP, Radvision, CeWe, Nokia and other companies see driving the future of multimedia? The Multimedia Grand Challenge is a set of problems and issues from these industry leaders, geared to engage the Multimedia research community towards solving relevant, interesting and challenging questions in the multimedia industry‚s 2-5 year horizon. The Grand Challenge was first presented as part of ACM Multimedia 2009. and it will be presented again in slightly modified form at ACM Multimedia 2010. Researchers are encouraged to submit working systems in response to these challenges to win the grand Challenge competition!

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*Challenges*
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CeWe Photo Set Theme Identification
Google Personal Diaries
Google Video Genre Classification
HP Visual Communication
Nokia Photo Location & Orientation
Radvision Content Adaptation
Radvision VideoConf Experience
Yahoo! Novel Image Understanding
Yahoo! Video Segmentation
We encourage you to consider the challenges and submit your contribution to the ACM Multimedia 2010 Grand Challenge track. The top submissions will be presented in a special event during the ACM Multimedia 2010 conference in Florence Italy. Based on these oral presentations in Florence, winners will be selected for Grand Challenge awards worth 1500 USD.

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*Paper Submission*
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New in 2010: _any_ long, short or demo paper submitted to the regular ACM Multimedia conference can be considered for the Grand Challenge. Regular papers that want to be considered should submit a 1-page additional statement indicating why this work addresses a certain challenge best. In addition, papers, demonstrations and ideas that do not fit the normal scientific style may be submitted to the Grand Challenge by submitting a separate 4-page paper to the Grand Challenge only. (We are afraid that we will NOT consider papers in this path that have been rejected for the scientific program.)
A 1-page statement to accompany an _accepted_ paper or a new 4-page grand challenge paper should be prepared in double-column ACM proceedings style and submitted via http://edas.info/N8591
The submissions must:
o Significantly address one of the industry challenges posted on the Grand Challenge web site.
o Depict working, presentable systems or demos.
o Describe why the system presents a novel and interesting solution.
A number of solutions (perhaps 10-20) will be selected as finalists and invited to describe their work, demonstrate their solution and argue for the paper's success in the Grand Challenge Session in Florence. Each finalist will have several minutes to present their case. Final winner(s) will be chosen by industry scientists, engineers and business luminaries.

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*Key Dates*
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August 1, 2010 Submission deadline
September 1, 2010 Acceptance notification
October 25, 2010 Conference starts

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*Contact*
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Malcolm Slaney, Yahoo! Research, USA (malcolm@ieee.org)
Cees Snoek, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands (cgmsnoek@uva.nl)

ACM Multimedia Grand Challenge 2010: Content Adaptation

One of the ACM Multimedia Grand Challenge 2010 is about content adaptation, probably one of THE tools providing Universal (Multi-)Media Access (UMA). In particular, it is called "Radvision Challenge 2010: Real-time Data Collaboration Adaptation for Multi-Device Video Conferencing" and details can be found here with the input/output described as follows:

Input for this challenge is a video capture of a free-hand drawing (see example video) in XGA.
Output for this challenge should be a set of “adapted” videos , with the same content in different (smaller) resolutions – for instance, VGA and QVGA. The adapted videos would ideally be regarded by users as perceptually optimal, meaning they hold the same content as the original.

The metrics for evaluation are "defined" as follows:

The following criteria could be used, as well as other evaluation metrics that you may devise:

1. Subjective comparison between the perceptual quality of the original and the “adapted” content.
2. Subjective comparison between the perceptual quality of a scaled-down version of the original (using a 5-tap poly-phase filter) and the “adapted” content.
3. Real-time Performance.

However, there are many possibilities to adapt content and evaluate the result which heavily depends on the user's context. Some people may think that the description of the input/output as well as the evaluation criteria is defined too vague and I tend to agree. Let me explain:

1. The input is given and for the output it is requested to produce "a set of adapted videos" that is "regarded by users as perceptually optimal". However, it's not clear to which context the input shall be adapted. The text says "different (smaller) resolutions" as an example but I can imaging that users will prefer the original video and regard it as perceptually optimal compared to anything else. Thus, in my view it is necessary to specify the context to which the video shall be adapted. The context may include a lot of things such as terminal device, decoding capabilities, network conditions, user location (stationary, mobile), etc., etc.
2. Subjective quality assessment is not an easy task and there are many possibilities and many approaches. Form the description above it is not clear how the subjective quality evaluation will be performed. In particular, I wonder whether "real" subjective tests as suggested by the Video Quality Experts Group (VQEG) will be adopted (e.g., DSIS - Double Stimulus Impairment Scale or ACR - Absolute Category Scale to just name two). In my view and in order to provide a fair evaluation it is absolutely necessary to define the exact procedure on how the subjective evaluation of the submissions will be performed. One possibility, of course, is the adoption of a standardized approach and probably DSIS is the right candidate.

Multimedia Grand Challenge 2009

As of today, eight challenges from six companies (HP, Google, CeWe, Yahoo!, Radvision, and Nokia) have been posted on http://www.multimediagrandchallenge.com/. More information about the Multimedia Grand Challenge can be found here, however, mainly driven by the major companies as listed above:

"What problems do Google, Yahoo, HP, Radvision, CeWe, Nokia and other companies see in the future of multimedia? The Multimedia Grand Challenge is a set of problems and issues from these (and other) industry leaders, geared to engage the Multimedia research community in solving relevant, interesting and challenging questions about the industry’s 2-5 year horizon for multimedia."

The eight challenges are listed below (in alphabetic order) and for details just follow the link. An overview can be also found at TechCrunch.

• CeWe Challenge: The Next Generation of Tangible Multimedia Products
• Google Challenge: Robust, As-Accurate-As-Human Genre Classification for Video
• HP Challenge: Robust Identification of Informative Multimedia Content in Web Pages
• Nokia Challenge: Where was this Photo Taken, and How?
• Radvision Challenge: Video Conferencing To Surpass “In-Person” Meeting Experience
• Radvision Challenge: Real-time Data Collaboration Adaptation for Multi-Device Video Conferencing
• Yahoo! Challenge: Robust Automatic Segmentation of Video According to Narrative Themes
• Yahoo! Challenge: Robust Clustering Guided by User Intent in Image Search