NYU WIRELESS Professor Yao Wang has received $75,000 from Cisco Systems, Inc., to support a research project on “Video Adaptation for HTTP Live Streaming Using Perceptual Quality and Rate Models Considering the Impact of Temporal Variation of Frame Rate and Quantization”.

In video streaming, the video coding rate has to be changed dynamically in response to changes in the sustainable bandwidth at the receiver. To optimize the perceptual quality, one must consider the impact of varying the video rate (often realized by varying quantization step size, frame rate, and frame size) on the perceived video quality. In this project, Prof. Wang and her students will perform subjective quality experiments to systematically evaluate the impact of such variations, and develop models that analytically relate the quality with the variation patterns of different encoding parameters. They will further design practical video adaptation algorithms under the recently standardized dynamic adaptive streaming over HTTP (DASH) framework, that can improve users’ quality of experience by exploiting the developed quality model.