Real-time BSD-driven adaptation along the temporal axis of H.264/AVC bitstreams

Abstract

MPEG-21 BSDL offers a solution for exposing the structure of a binary media resource as an XML description, and for the generation of a tailored media resource using a transformed XML description. The main contribution of this paper is the introduction of a real-time work flow for the XML-driven adaptation of H.264/AVC bitstreams in the temporal domain. This real-time approach, which is in line with the vision of MPEG-21 BSDL, is made possible by two key technologies: BFlavor (BSDL + XFlavor) for the efficient generation of XML descriptions and Streaming Transformations for XML (STX) for the efficient transformation of these descriptions. Our work flow is validated in several applications, all using H.264/AVC bitstreams: the exploitation and emulation of temporal scalability, as well as the creation of video skims using key frame selection. Special attention is paid to the deployment of hierarchical B pictures and to the use of placeholder slices for synchronization purposes. Extensive performance data are also provided. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.