Interactive Browsing of Remote JPEF 2000 Image Sequences

This papers studies a novel prefetching scheme for the remote browsing of sequences of high resolution JPEG 2000 images. Using this scheme, an user is able to select randomly any of the remote images for its analysis, repeating this process with other images after some undefined time. Our solution has been proposed in a low bit-rate communication context where the complete transmission of any of the images for its lossless recovery should take too much time for an interactive visualization. For this reason, quality scalability is used in order to minimize the decoding latency. Frequently, the user can also play a "video\´\´, moving sequentially on the neighbour (consecutive in time over previous or following) images of the currently displayed one. With the objective of hiding also the link latency, the proposed data scheduler transmits in parallel data of the image that it is currently displayed and data of the rest of the temporally adjacent images. This scheduler uses a model based on the quality progression of the image in order to estimate which percentage of the bandwidth is dedicated to prefetch data. Our experimental results prove that a significant benefit can be achieved in terms of both subjective quality and responsiveness by means of prefetching.