Abstract
The quality of telemedicine depends on the quality of the delivered information. The authors proposed an integrated network QoS control system for telemedicine in the previous research. The system is to shape multiple data streams by dropping blocks of data, which is defined not to put each application into trouble by the reduction of data. In this research, the authors applied the JPEG 2000 image format to the QoS system for enabling telemedicine system to reduce the quality, resolution, or frame-rate of transmitted images along the target telemedicine applications. A JPEG 2000 image is denoted by a header and a container, which consists of multi-layered blocks of data. A JPEG 2000 decoder can produce a low-quality or low-resolution image, even when several blocks of data are missing from the original container. The evaluation of the prototype confirms that the proposed approach enables dynamic control of the resolution and quality of an image stream. The control of one parameter doesn't harm other parameters unexpectedly, and the control affects the required bandwidth as intended. Therefore, this paper confirmed that the combination of the proposed QoS control mechanism and the JPEG 2000 realizes flexible and dynamic QoS control for image-based communication in telemedicine.
