Soft Video Uploading for Low-Power Crowdsourced Multi-view Video Streaming

抄録

The conventional digital video encoding and transmission are inefficient for crowdsourced multi-view video uploading due to its high power consumption, and undesirable quality degradation in unstable wireless channel. Soft video delivery scheme known as SoftCast skips digital video encoding and transmission to decrease power consumption in video encoding and transmission. In addition, it achieves graceful quality improvement with the improvement of wireless channel quality by directly sending linear-transformed video signals. However, there are two typical issues to apply conventional soft video delivery to crowdsourced multi-view video uploading. First, since soft video delivery has been designed for direct path between each contributor and the access point (AP), it may suffer low video quality when a contributor uploads its video to the AP over unstable direct wireless path. Second, conventional soft video delivery may suffer low video quality due to the redundant transmission of correlated videos because it does not exploit inter-camera correlations existed in multi-view videos. In this paper, we propose a cluster-based redirect video uploading scheme for high-quality and low-power crowdsourced multi-view video streaming. The proposed scheme integrates the four approaches of network clustering, delegate selection, soft video delivery, and four-dimensional discrete consine transform (4D-DCT) to redirectly upload the captured videos to the AP. Specifically, network clustering and delegate selection leverage the redirect path between the contributors and the AP. Soft video delivery removes power-hungry digital encoding and transmission by directly sending frequency-domain coefficients using multi-dimensional DCT and near-analog modulation. 4D-DCT exploits the content correlations between the contributors to reduce redundant transmissions. Evaluation results show that our proposed scheme outperforms the conventional soft video delivery scheme when the channel quality difference between the direct and redirect paths increases. In addition, our scheme outperforms the digitalbased video uploading schemes in terms of both video quality and power consumption. For example, the proposed scheme yields graceful quality improvement with the improvement of wireless channel quality, however, the digital-based schemes suffer from sudden quality degradation due to synchronization errors in decoding.