Multimedia Communication

Hadi

Video Encoding Optimizations for Live Video Streaming

FOKUS Media Web Symposium

20th – 24th June 2022 | Berlin, Germany

 

Abstract: Live video streaming is expected to become mainstream in the fifth-generation (5G) mobile networks. Optimizing video encoding for live video streaming is challenging due to the latency introduced by any optimization method. In this talk, we introduce low-latency video optimization methods that are utilized to improve the quality of video encodings by predicting optimized encoding parameters.

Hadi Amirpour is a postdoc research fellow at ATHENA  directed by Prof. Christian Timmerer. He received his B.Sc. degrees in Electrical and Biomedical Engineering, and he pursued his M.Sc. in Electrical Engineering. He got his Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Klagenfurt in 2022. He was appointed co-chair of Task Force 7 (TF7) Immersive Media Experience (IMEx) at the 15th Qualinet meeting. He was involved in the project EmergIMG, a Portuguese consortium on emerging imaging technologies, funded by the Portuguese funding agency and H2020. Currently, he is working on the ATHENA project in cooperation with its industry partner Bitmovin. His research interests are image processing and compression, video processing and compression, quality of experience, emerging 3D imaging technology, and medical image analysis.

Hadi

Authors: Haichao Yao (Beijing Jiaotong University), Rongrong Ni (Beijing Jiaotong University), Hadi Amirpour (Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt), Christian Timmerer (Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt)Yao Zhao (Beijing Jiaotong University).

The 13th ACM Multimedia Systems Conference MMSys’22

14th – 17th June 2022 | Athlone, Ireland.

Conference Website

The ACM Multimedia Systems Conference (MMSys) provides a forum for researchers to present and share their latest research findings in multimedia systems. While research about specific aspects of multimedia systems is regularly published in the various proceedings and transactions of the networking, operating systems, real-time systems, databases, mobile computing, distributed systems, computer vision, and middleware communities, MMSys aims to cut across these domains in the context of multimedia data types.

This year, MMSys hosted around 150 on-site participants from academia and industry. Five ATHENA members travelled to Athlone, Ireland, to present four papers by Reza Farahani, Babak Taraghi, and Vignesh V Menon in two tracks, i.e., Open Dataset & Software Track and Demo & Industry Track.

Moreover, two presentations in Mentoring & Postdoc Networking event by ATHENA postdocs:

  • Hadi Amirpour,  “Video Encoding Optimization for Live Video Streaming” (pdf)
  • Farzad Tashtarian, “QoE Optimization in Live Streaming” (pdf)

 

We presented the poster “The Power in Your Pocket: Boosting Video Quality with Super-Resolution on Mobile Devices” at the Austrian Computer Science Day 2022 conference. The poster summarizes research about improving the visual quality of video streaming on mobile devices by utilizing deep neural network-based enhancement techniques.

Here is the list of papers that we cover in the poster:

  1. Super-resolution Based Bitrate Adaptation for HTTP Adaptive Streaming for Mobile Devices

  2. MoViDNN: A Mobile Platform for Evaluating Video Quality Enhancement with Deep Neural Networks

This years´s “Lange Nacht der Forschung” took place on May 20, 2022. The LNDF is Austria´s most significant national research event to present the accomplishments to the broad public. ITEC was represented by three stations and involved in the station of Computer Games and Engineering, and it was a fantastic experience for everyone! We tried to make our research easily understandable for everyone.

 

1st International Workshop on Edge Network Softwarization (ENS 2022) co-located with IEEE International Conference on Network Softwarization (NetSoft 2022)  Milan, Italy

Authors: Josef Hammer and Hermann Hellwagner, Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt

Abstract: Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC) is a central piece of 5G telecommunication systems and is essential to satisfy the challenging low-latency demands of future applications. MEC provides a cloud computing platform at the edge of the radio access network that developers can utilize for their applications. In [1] we argued that edge computing should be transparent to clients and introduced a solution to that end. This paper presents how to efficiently implement such a transparent approach, leveraging Software-Defined Networking. For high performance and scalability, our architecture focuses on three aspects: (i) a modular architecture that can easily be distributed onto multiple switches/controllers, (ii) multiple filter stages to avoid screening traffic not intended for the edge, and (iii) several strategies to keep the number of flows low to make the best use of the precious flow table memory in hardware switches. A performance evaluation is shown, with results from a real edge/fog testbed.

Keywords: 5G, Multi-Access Edge Computing, MEC, Patricia Trie, SDN, Software-Defined Networking

Hadi

Title: Video Complexity Dataset (VCD)

The 13th ACM Multimedia Systems Conference (ACM MMSys 2022) Open Dataset and Software (ODS) track

June 14–17, 2022 |  Athlone, Ireland

Authors: Hadi Amirpour (Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt), Vignesh V Menon (Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt), Samira Afzal (Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt), Mohammad Ghanbari (School of Computer Science and Electronic Engineering, University of Essex, Colchester, UK), and Christian Timmerer (Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt).

Abstract: This paper provides an overview of the open Video Complexity Dataset (VCD) which comprises 500 Ultra High Definition (UHD) resolution test video sequences. These sequences are provided at 24 frames per second (fps) and stored online in losslessly encoded 8-bit 4:2:0 format. In this paper, all sequences are characterized by spatial and temporal complexities, rate-distortion complexity, and encoding complexity with the x264 AVC/H.264 and x265 HEVC/H.265 video encoders. The dataset is tailor-made for cutting-edge multimedia applications such as video streaming, two-pass encoding, per-title encoding, scene-cut detection, etc. Evaluations show that the dataset includes diversity in video complexities. Hence, using this dataset is recommended for training and testing video coding applications. All data have been made publicly available as part of the dataset, which can be used for various applications.
The details of VCD can be accessed online at https://vcd.itec.aau.at.

Optimizing QoE in Live Streaming over Wireless Networks using Machine Learning Techniques

May 25, 2022, Edinburgh, UK

Empowered by today’s rich tools for media generation and collaborative production and the convenient wireless access (e.g., WiFi and cellular networks) to the Internet, crowdsourced live streaming over wireless networks have become very popular. However, crowdsourced wireless live streaming presents unique video delivery challenges that make a difficult tradeoff among three core factors: bandwidth, computation/storage, and latency. However, [read more]

 

 

 

 

 

CoPaM: Cost-aware VM Placement and Migration for Mobile services in Multi-Cloudlet environment: An SDN-based approach

Elsevier Computer Communications journal 

 

Shirzad Shahryari (Ferdowsi University of Mashhad, Mashhad, Iran), Farzad Tashtarian  (Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt), Seyed-Amin Hosseini-Seno (Ferdowsi University of Mashhad, Mashhad, Iran).

Abstract: Edge Cloud Computing (ECC) is a new approach for bringing Mobile Cloud Computing (MCC) services closer to mobile users in order to facilitate the complicated application execution on resource-constrained mobile devices. The main objective of the ECC solution with the cloudlet approach is mitigating the latency and augmenting the available bandwidth. This is basically done by deploying servers (a.k.a ”cloudlets”) close to the user’s device on the edge of the cellular network. Once the user requests mount, the resource constraints in a cloudlet will lead to resource shortages. This challenge, however, can be overcome using a network of cloudlets for sharing their resources. On the other hand, when considering the users’ mobility along with the limited resource of the cloudlets serving them, the user-cloudlet communication may need to go through multiple hops, which may seriously affect the communication delay between them and the quality of services (QoS).


Hadi

EUVIP 2022 Special Session on

“Machine Learning for Immersive Content Processing”

September, 2022, Lisbon, Portugal

Link

Organizers:

  • Hadi Amirpour, Klagenfurt University, Austria
  • Christine Guillemot, INSA, France
  • Christian Timmerer, Klagenfurt University, Austria

 

Brief description:

The importance of remote communication is becoming more and more important in particular after  COVID-19 crisis. However, to bring a more realistic visual experience, more than the traditional two-dimensional (2D) interfaces we know today is required. Immersive media such as 360-degree, light fields, point cloud, ultra-high-definition, high dynamic range, etc. can fill this gap. These modalities, however, face several challenges from capture to display. Learning-based solutions show great promise and significant performance in improving traditional solutions in addressing the challenges. In this special session, we will focus on research works aimed at extending and improving the use of learning-based architectures for immersive imaging technologies.

Important dates:

Paper Submissions: 6th June, 2022
Paper Notifications: 11th July, 2022