Video adaptation using the variation factory

Video adaptation is an active research area aiming at delivering heterogeneous content to yet heterogeneous devices under different network conditions. This paper presents an architecture for generating variations (different versions) from methods such as video transcoding, media conversion and summarization. The work in this paper concentrates on video data and aims to show video variation supported with metadata as an approach to adaptation to enable ubiquitous access. By video products are defined and the variation factory is introduced It generates different versions of the source and an MPEG-7 metadata document. The information contained in the metadata document helps the system to identify the most appropriate version that meets the required quality of service (QoS). In addition to the implementation of the commonly used reduction methods, two novel methods, viz. object-based and segment-based variations are introduced. Our proposals are implemented and experimentally validated.