DESIGN AND IMPLEMENTATION OF A BANDWIDTH-EFFICIENT FRAMEWORK FOR MJPEG VIDEO TRANSMISSION

Abstract

The applications which rely on the Internet for video transmission are always facing the issue of bandwidth availability. Two such important applications are Telemedicine and Distance Learning. The former facilitates availability of medical services over the Internet while the latter allows to access education facilities over the Internet. Motion JPEG is a standard for video data transmission over the Internet. The video consists of a sequence of moving frames. The principal idea behind MJPEG transmission is to encode each video frame using JPEG compression algorithm. Even though this method is computationally simple one, it does not take into account the closeness of successive video frames and thereby requires more bandwidth for the transmission. Typically, telemedicine and distance learning videos have a little amount of motion. It means that the adjacent frames have a great degree of similarity. The dissertation work presented here proposes a framework that taps this characteristic. The framework consists of an algorithm that analyzes frames in terms of a two-dimensional matrix of pixels. The algorithm then transmits only the selected portions of the video frames that undergo change and refrains from transmission of redundant portion in the adjoining frame. This causes reduction in the bandwidth requirement of MJPEG transmission for telemedicine and distance-learning applications while slightly affecting the quality of video during playback of frames on receiver side. The work presented here also includes the analysis of the impact on the quality and the processing on the receiver side. The implementation of the proposed framework is done using client-server architecture and Real-Time Transport Protocol (RTP) using Java language. The results have shown a considerable reduction in bandwidth requirement at an acceptable video quality. Moreover, the results have shown decrease in the amount of processing on the receiver side during playback, which is an added advantage.