Assessing Dynamic Utility Specification as a means for improving surveillance-related tasks in wireless streaming video applications

Proper and timely reaction to events of interest in surveillance applications often depend on the ability to receive high-quality video in severely constrained wireless networks. Using a low-bandwidth, motion-adapted MJPEG video encoding format and utility-based content-adaptation scheme developed at UVA, previous researchers have shown that Dynamic Preference Specification (DPS), i.e. giving users the ability to describe to the system the relative value they place on frame rate versus image resolution, increases the overall utility of video streams delivered by the system. This paper proposes and evaluates a new GUI abstraction, Dynamic Utility Specification (DUS), that gives users the ability to describe absolute adjustments to the value they place on the video stream, based on the content of the stream and their role within the surveillance system overall. A human subject experiment tests DUS against a DPS-only control setting, with the null hypothesis being that there is no difference in user performance between the two setups. The exploration of multiple end-users working in a constrained bandwidth environment of 160 kbps positively depicts a significant statistical increase in the mission success with DUS.