Content-Based Time Sampling for Efficient Video Delivery over Networks of Low and Variable Bandwidth

A new content-based algorithm is proposed for efficient delivery of video sequences under networks of low and variable bandwidth. It dynamically discards the audiovisual content that cannot be afforded by the network, (e.g., due to bandwidth variations), at a content cost, which outperforms the popular linear frame skipping method. The algorithm estimates a) the amount of information that can be currently delivered by the network and b) the most representative of the frames that would be normally transmitted. All calculations are performed directly on the MPEG compressed domain requiring minimal decoding of the captured multimedia information. The computational complexity of the proposed scheme is also minimal and thus it can be applied in almost real time. A proposed objective evaluation scheme reveals the validity of the approach