Internetworking and Media Communications Research Laboratories
Department of Computer Science, Kent State University
http://medianet.kent.edu


 

Perceptual Media Compression for Multiple Viewers with Feedback Delay

 

 

 

Oleg Komogortsev,  Javed I. Khan
Internetworking and Media Communications Research Laboratories
Department of Computer Science
Kent State University, 233 MSB, Kent, OH 44242


Last Revised August 12, 2005

 
 

 

Abstract

 

Human eyes have limited perception capabilities; for example, only 2 degrees of our 140 degree vision field provide the highest quality of perception. Due to this fact the idea of perceptual focus emerged to allow a visual content to be changed in a way that only part of the visual field where a human gaze is directed is encoded with a high quality. The image quality in the periphery can be reduced without a viewer noticing it. This compression approach allows a significant decrease in the number of bits required for image encoding, and in the case of the 3D image rendering, it decreases the computational burden.  A number of previous researchers have investigated the topic of perceptual focus but only for a single viewer. In our research we investigate a dynamically changing multi-viewer scenario. In this type of scenario a number of people are watching the same visual content at the same time. Each person has his/her own perceptual focus area which changes over time. The visual content is sent through a network with a fixed delay/lag which provides an additional challenge to the whole scheme. The goal of our work was to investigate and develop a method of multi-viewer perceptual focus zones adaptation for real-time media perceptual compression and transmission. In our research we also look into the impact that such a method can have on transmission bandwidth and computational burden reduction.

Keywords: Perceptual compression, visual media adaptation. 

This report contains experiment clips used to test the performance of this system.  The videos are MPEG-2 ISO 13818-2 streams. We recommend using MPlayer found at www.mplayerhq.hu or Winamp to view these video samples.

 

 

Video Samples:

 

Car

      Shamu

      Airplanes