Resource-driven MPEG-4 FGS for universal multimedia access

The universal multimedia access (UMA) paradigm is aimed at enabling multimedia data to be accessed by a large number of users/clients at any time, and from anywhere, based on their preferences, communication channel characteristics and device capabilities. For the implementation of the UMA framework, "universal" scalable video coding techniques that enable adaptive video transmission based on these three parameters are essential. Fine-granular-scalability (FGS) has recently been adopted as the MPEG-4 standard for the efficient and flexible distribution of multimedia over heterogeneous wired and wireless networks. While it has already been proven that FGS fulfils the first two UMA requirements (adaptive and robust transmission based on the channel characteristics and user preferences) due to its bit-rate scalability, the ability of FGS to provide device-based complexity-scalability was hitherto unproven. This paper proposes using an information theoretic framework, based on rate-distortion-complexity theory, for evaluating bit-rate and complexity scalable coding techniques for UMA. In this context, the ability of FGS to provide bit-rate and complexity scalability that allows easy and smooth navigation across the operational rate-distortion-complexity surface is demonstrated. Moreover, a comparison with non-scalable MPEG schemes is also given. Furthermore, we illustrate how this framework can be used in an FGS-based resource-driven video streaming system.