NAIVE—network aware Internet video encoding

Abstract

The distribution of digital video content over computer networks has become commonplace. Unfortunately, most digital video encoding standards do not degrade gracefully in the face of packet losses, which often occur in a bursty fashion. We propose an new video encoding system that scales well with respect to the network's performance and degrades gracefully under packet loss. Our encoder sends packets that consist of a small random subset of pixels distributed throughout a video frame. The receiver places samples in their proper location (through a previously agreed ordering), and applies a reconstruction algorithm on the received samples to produce an image. Each of the packets is independent, and does not depend on the successful transmission of any other packets. Additionally, each packet contains information that is distributed over the entire image. We also apply spatial and temporal optimization to achieve better compression.