A quality decision method for multi-object content based on user requirements

Several technologies to deal with multi-object content (SMIL, MPEG-4 and so on) have been developed. A technology to control the quality of each object in multi-object content is still needed so that we can provide content that adapts to various situations. In addition, as broadband networks become increasingly sophisticated, it is more important to control content quality based on user requirements rather than just the available network bandwidth. In this paper, we propose a quality decision method based on user requirements for multi-object content delivery applications. We assume that content creators and receivers use the application and they give priorities to the objects. The proposed method evaluates the objects using evaluate functions which take the given priorities as parameters and decides the quality for each object using dynamic programming or a greedy algorithm. To show the usefulness of our method, we applied our method to MPEG-4-based application. As a result, we could control the quality within a reasonable time. We also found that we obtained different quality assignments when we used different evaluation functions, and that our method reflected the user requirements.