Worthy visual content on mobile through interactive video streaming

This paper builds on an interactive streaming architecture that supports both user feedback interpretation, and temporal juxtaposition of multiple video bitstreams in a single streaming session. As an original contribution, we explain how these functionalities can be exploited to offer improved viewing experience, when accessing high-resolution or multi-views video content through individual and potentially bandwidth-constrained connections. This is done by giving the client the opportunity to select interactively a preferred version among the multiple streams that are offered to render the scene. An instance of this architecture has been implemented extending the liveMedia streaming library and using the x264 video encoder. Automatic methods have been designed and implemented to generate the multiple versions of the streamed content. In a surveillance scenario, the versions are constructed by sub-sampling the original high resolution image, or by cropping the image sequence to focus on regions of interest, in a temporally consistent way. In a soccer game context, zoomed-in versions of far view shots are computed and offered as alternatives to the sub-sampled sequence. We demonstrate the feasibility and relevance of the approach through subjective experiments.