Improving multimedia streaming with content-aware video scaling

Streaming video applications need to respond to congestion in the network by deploying mechanisms to reduce their bandwidth requirements under conditions of heavy load. In reducing bandwidth, video with high motion will look better if all the frames are kept but the frames have low quality, while video with low motion will look better if some frames are dropped but the remaining frames have high quality. In this paper, we present a content-aware scaling mechanism that reduces the bandwidth occupied by an application by either dropping frames (temporal scaling) or by reducing the quality of the frames transmitted (quality scaling). We have designed a streaming video client and server with the server capable of quantifying the amount of motion in an MPEG stream and scaling each scene either temporally or by quality as appropriate, maximizing the quality of each video stream. User studies show that our content-aware scaling can improve perceived video quality by as much as 50%.