VSYNC: Bandwidth-Efficient and Distortion-Tolerant Video File Synchronization

We introduce video-sync (VSYNC), a video file synchronization system that efficiently uses a bidirectional communications link to maintain up-to-date video sources at remote ends to a desired resolution and distortion level. By automatically detecting and transmitting only the differences between video files, VSYNC is able to avoid unnecessary re-transmission of the entire video when there are only minor differences between video copies. A hierarchical hashing scheme is designed to allow synchronization to within some user-defined distortion, white being rate-efficient and computationally tractable. Distributed video coding is used to realize further rate savings when transmitting video updates. VSYNC is bandwidth-efficient and is useful in many scenarios including video backup, video sharing, and video authentication applications. Experimental results show that rate-savings ranging from 2× to 10× can be obtained by VSYNC with about 10% of the frames being edited, compared to re- transmitting the compressed video or using a file synchronization utility such as rsync.