A Pragmatically Designed Adaptive and Web-compliant Object-based Video Streaming Methodology: Implementation and Subjective Evaluation

Abstract

The bulk of contemporary online video traffic is encoded in a traditional manner, hereby neglecting most, if not all, of the semantics of the underlying visual scene. One essential piece of semantic information in the context of video streaming is awareness of the objects that jointly constitute the scene. A canonical example of a benefit associated with such object awareness is the ability to subdivide a video fragment in respectively a background and one or more foreground objects. This paper reports on a pragmatically designed video streaming approach that exploits object-related knowledge in order to improve the real-time adaptability of video streaming sessions (manifested in the form of increased granularity in terms of streaming quality control). The proposed approach is completely compliant with present-day video codecs and HTTP Adaptive Streaming schemes, most notably H.264 and MPEG-DASH. Findings from subjecting the proposed video streaming technique to a comparative subjective evaluation suggest that scenarios exist where the presented approach holds the capacity to improve on traditional streaming in terms of user-perceived video quality.