Principles and applications of content-aware video communication

Most traditional video communication systems consider videos as low-level bit streams, ignoring the underlying visual content. Content-aware video communication is a new framework that explores the strong correlation between video content, resource (bit rate), and utility (quality). Such a framework facilitates new ways of quality modeling and resource allocation in multimedia communication. We demonstrate advantages of the content-aware approaches in two applications. First, content-aware models were developed for predicting video traffic for live video streams. The video traffic models were evaluated in a dynamic network resource allocation system. Our simulations have shown that, compared to existing techniques, significant reduction (55% to 70%) in required network resources can be achieved. Second, we have used the content-aware principle for automatic generation of utility function (subjective quality vs. bit rate) for live video. Our results indicate that high accuracy in estimating utility functions can be achieved. Such utility functions can be applied to optimal transcoding and media scaling in distributed network environments