An Efficient Audio-Video Synchronization Methodology

In a multimedia information system, different types of digital media (such as video, audio, etc.) are stored, transmitted, and presented. During presentation time, the synchronization between audio and video data has to be preserved in order to offer the best perceptual quality. However, the timestamp-based synchronization methodology in MPEG/System layer suffers data packet loss during transmission, and the resulted absence of synchronization will be unacceptable for users. In order to address this issue, an information hiding based synchronization methodology has been proposed. In this methodology, audio data is embedded within the corresponding video frames by means of high bitrate information hiding techniques. At the receiver, the embedded audio data is extracted and played with the host video frames to achieve the synchronization. With this approach, significant advantages have been obtained: (1) the communication channel for audio data transmission is avoided; (2) the synchronization between audio and video data is robust to packet loss.