By combining four different open standards belonging to the ISO/IEC JTC1/SC29 WG11 (a.k.a. MPEG) and W3C, this paper advances an architecture for mobile, medical oriented virtual collaborative environments. The various users are represented according to MPEG-UD (MPEG User Description) while the security issues are dealt with by deploying the WebID principles. On the server side, irrespective of their elementary types (text, image, video, 3D, …), the medical data are aggregated into hierarchical, interactive multimedia scenes which are alternatively represented into MPEG-4 BiFS or HTML5 standards. This way, each type of content can be optimally encoded according to its particular constraints (semantic, medical practice, network conditions, etc.). The mobile device should ensure only the displaying of the content (inside an MPEG player or an HTML5 browser) and the capturing of the user interaction. The overall architecture is implemented and tested under the framework of the MEDUSA European project, in partnership with medical institutions. The testbed considers a server emulated by a PC and heterogeneous user devices (tablets, smartphones, laptops) running under iOS, Android and Windows operating systems. The connection between the users and the server is alternatively ensured by WiFi and 3G/4G networks.
The present paper provides the proof-of-concepts for the use of the MPEG-4 multimedia scene representations (BiFS and LASeR) as a virtualization tool for RDP-based applications (e.g. MS Windows applications). Two main applicative benefits are thus granted. First, any legacy application can be virtualized without additional programming effort. Second, heterogeneous mobile devices (different manufacturers, OS) can collaboratively enjoy full multimedia experiences. From the methodological point of view, the main novelty consists in (1) designing an architecture allowing the conversion of the RDP content into a semantic multimedia scene-graph and its subsequent rendering on the client and (2) providing the underlying scene graph management and interactivity tools. Experiments consider 5 users and two RDP applications (MS Word and Internet Explorer), and benchmark our solution against two state-of-the-art technologies (VNC and FreeRDP). The visual quality is evaluated by six objective measures (e.g. PSNR<37dB, SSIM<0.99). The network traffic evaluation shows that: (1) for text editing, the MPEG-based solutions outperforms the VNC by a factor 1.8 while being 2 times heavier then the FreeRDP; (2) for Internet browsing, the MPEG solutions outperform both VNC and FreeRDP by factors of 1.9 and 1.5, respectively. The average round-trip times (less than 40ms) cope with real-time application constraints.
KEYWORDS: Visualization, Image compression, Multimedia, Video, Image processing, Video compression, 3D image processing, Computer programming, Video coding, Binary data
Be there a traditional mobile user wanting to connect to a remote multimedia server. In order to allow them to enjoy
the same user experience remotely (play, interact, edit, store and share capabilities) as in a traditional fixed LAN
environment, several dead-locks are to be dealt with: (1) a heavy and heterogeneous content should be sent through a
bandwidth constrained network; (2) the displayed content should be of good quality; (3) user interaction should be
processed in real-time and (4) the complexity of the practical solution should not exceed the features of the mobile
client in terms of CPU, memory and battery. The present paper takes this challenge and presents a fully operational
MPEG-4 BiFS solution.
The main issue in this paper is to deploy a compressing algorithm for heterogeneous content (text, graphics, image and video) with low-complex decoding. Such an algorithm will be involved in the remote display core problem for mobile thin clients: it allows the graphical content, computed on a remote server, to be displayer on the user's thin terminal, even when the network constraints (bandwidth, errors) are very strict. The paper is structured into three parts. First, a client-server architecture is presented. On the server side, the graphical content is parsed, converted and binary encoded into the MPEG 4 (BiFS, LASeR) format. This content is further streamed to the terminal, where it is played into a simple MPEG player. Secondly, this architecture is considered as a test bed for MPEG 4 performance assessment for various types of content (image, graphics, text). The quantitative results were focussed on bandwidth requirements and quality of experience. Finally, the conclusions are structured as a reference benchmarking of the MPEG (BiFS, LASeR) and outside (VNC) mobile remote display potential solutions.
Under the framework of the FP-7 European MobiThin project, the present study addresses the issue of remote display
representation for mobile thin client. The main issue is to design a compressing algorithm for heterogeneous content
(text, graphics, image and video) with low-complex decoding. As a first step in this direction, we propose a novel
software architecture, based on BiFS - Binary Format for Scenes (MPEG-4 Part 11). On the server side, the graphical
content is parsed, converted and binary encoded into the BiFS format. This content is then streamed to the terminal,
where it is played on a simple MPEG player. The viability of this solution is validated by comparing it to the most
intensively used wired solutions, e.g. VNC - Virtual Network Computing.
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