Intelligent video smoother for multimedia communications

Multimedia communications often require intramedia synchronization for video data to prevent potential playout discontinuity resulting from network delay variation (jitter) while still achieving satisfactory playout throughput. In this paper, we propose a neural network (NN) based intravideo synchronization mechanism, called the intelligent video smoother (IVS), operating at the application layer of the receiving end system. The IVS is composed of an NN traffic predictor, an NN window determinator, and a window-based playout smoothing algorithm. The NN traffic predictor employs an on-line-trained back-propagation neural network (BPNN) to periodically predict the characteristics of traffic modeled by a generic interrupted Bernoulli process (IBP) over a future fixed time period. With the predicted traffic characteristics, the NN window determinator determines the corresponding optimal window by means of an off-line-trained BPNN in an effort to achieve a maximum of the playout quality (Q) value. The window-based playout smoothing algorithm then dynamically adopts various playout rates according to the window and the number of packets in the buffer. Finally, we show that via simulation results and live video scenes, compared to two other playout approaches, IVS achieves high-throughput and low-discontinuity playout under a mixture of IBP arrivals