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Applied Sciences
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Recent Developments on Multimedia Computing and Networking
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Recent Developments on Multimedia Computing and Networking

A special issue of Applied Sciences (ISSN 2076-3417). This special issue belongs to the section "Electrical, Electronics and Communications Engineering".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (31 May 2020) | Viewed by 18630

Special Issue Editors

Dr. Dimitris Kanellopoulos

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Department of Mathematics, University of Patras, GR-26500 Patras, Greece
Interests: multimedia networks; quality of service (QoS) in multimedia networks; mobile ad hoc networks; wireless networks; wireless sensor networks; computer networks design, modeling, and implementation
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Dr. Martin Fleury

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
School of EAST, University of Suffolk, Ipswich IP4 1Q, UK
Interests: multimedia networks; video streaming over wireless networks; P2P streaming; video coding; video security
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Nowadays, industry is making considerable investments in delivering digital video and audio to consumers, while many multimedia applications are emerging at a fast pace in various sectors, such as medicine, education, and administration. Multimedia computing is related to all aspects of hardware and software systems that result in the synchronization of a variety of different media types (e.g., audio and video) to convey information. Recent progress in communication, storage, and distributed computing allows multimedia information in networked and mobile computing systems to be integrated, semantically analyzed, and shared. This progress concerns: (1) the capture, creation, transmission, storage, semantic analysis, integration, presentation, and sharing of multimedia information; (2) hardware and software issues that are unique to multimedia computing; and (3) the development of multimedia standards, user interfaces, programming environments, analytical tools, security protocols, and applications. Meanwhile, multimedia networking applications benefit from the rapid development of encoding techniques for multimedia data sources, effective Quality of Service (QoS) control mechanisms, and Quality of Experience (QoE) criteria for system optimization. Interoperability solutions are also being proposed to integrate wired and wireless heterogeneous networking systems for multimedia communication. Another challenge is ensuring that the multimedia-networked content is fully interoperable, with ease of management and standardized multimedia content adapted for interoperable delivery, as well as intellectual property management and protection (i.e., digital rights management) being successfully incorporated into the system. Therefore, there is an inherent need to present frameworks, standards, techniques, QoS control mechanisms, QoE criteria for system optimization, and other tools that deal with such components in multimedia networking. As networks originally did not protect multimedia content from piracy or protect the privacy of personal communications, there is also a need for efficient multimedia-specific protection solutions.

This Special Issue solicits novel work in terms of solutions and techniques for multimedia computing and networking. We look forward to creating a forum in which researchers in the domain of multimedia computing and networking can share their results, techniques, surveys, analyses, and discussions of the problems of multimedia computing and networking. Topics of interest for this Special Issue are not limited strictly to traditional multimedia networking problems, but also include topics that address related fields over wireless multimedia sensor networks (WMSNs) or mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) such as (but not limited to):

  • Transmission techniques for multimedia information over MANETs or WMSNs.
  • Video streaming over MANETs or WMSNs
  • Multimedia standards, user interfaces, analytical tools, video security protocols, and applications.
  • Encoding techniques of multimedia data sources.
  • Effective QoS control mechanisms.
  • Multimedia system optimization through QoE criteria/support.
  • Interoperability solutions that integrate wired and wireless heterogeneous multimedia networked systems.
  • Multimedia content adaptation for interoperable delivery.
  • Intellectual property management and protection.
  • Multimedia security mechanisms to protect content and privacy.

Dr. Dimitris Kanellopoulos
Dr. Martin Fleury
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Applied Sciences is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • video coding and security
  • video streaming
  • congestion control in WMSNs or MANETs
  • QoS control mechanisms

Published Papers (7 papers)

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Research

14 pages, 429 KiB  
Article
A Cloud-Based Distributed Architecture to Accelerate Video Encoders
by Juan Gutiérrez-Aguado, Raúl Peña-Ortiz, Miguel Garcia-Pineda and Jose M. Claver
Appl. Sci. 2020, 10(15), 5070; https://doi.org/10.3390/app10155070 - 23 Jul 2020
Cited by 3 | Viewed by 2548
Abstract
Nowadays, video coding and transcoding have a great interest and important impact in areas such as high-definition video and entertainment, healthcare and elderly care, high-resolution video surveillance, self-driving cars, or e-learning. This growing demand for high-resolution video boosts the proposal of new codecs [...] Read more.
Nowadays, video coding and transcoding have a great interest and important impact in areas such as high-definition video and entertainment, healthcare and elderly care, high-resolution video surveillance, self-driving cars, or e-learning. This growing demand for high-resolution video boosts the proposal of new codecs and the development of their encoders that require high computational requirements. Therefore, new strategies are needed to accelerate them. Cloud infrastructures offer interesting features for video coding, such as on-demand resource allocation, multitenancy, elasticity, and resiliency. This paper proposes a cloud-based distributed architecture, where the network and the storage layers have been tuned, to accelerate video encoders over an elastic number of worker encoder nodes. Moreover, an application is developed and executed in the proposed architecture to allow the creation of encoding jobs, their dynamic assignment, their execution in the worker encoder nodes, and the reprogramming of the failed ones. To validate the proposed architecture, the parallel execution of existing video encoders, x265 for H.265/HEVC and libvpx-vp9 for VP9, has been evaluated in terms of scalability, workload, and job distribution, varying the number of encoder nodes. The quality of the encoded videos has been analyzed for different bit rates and number of frames per job using the Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR). Results show that our proposal maintains video quality compared with the sequential encoding while improving encoding time, which can decrease near 90%, depending on the codec and the number of encoder nodes. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Recent Developments on Multimedia Computing and Networking)
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17 pages, 2209 KiB  
Article
QoS-Aware Flexible Handover Management in Software-Defined Mobile Networks
by Yeunwoong Kyung and Tae-Kook Kim
Appl. Sci. 2020, 10(12), 4264; https://doi.org/10.3390/app10124264 - 22 Jun 2020
Cited by 9 | Viewed by 2491
Abstract
Handover support is one of the important issues in mobile networks to guarantee the quality of service (QoS) requirements for mobile users. Alongside the development of network technologies, handover management to provide service continuity has been researched and applied for the Internet or [...] Read more.
Handover support is one of the important issues in mobile networks to guarantee the quality of service (QoS) requirements for mobile users. Alongside the development of network technologies, handover management to provide service continuity has been researched and applied for the Internet or cellular networks such as 3G/4G/5G. However, each network paradigm provides its own individual handover management system, even though there are different kinds of QoS requirements for various mobile services. This causes inefficient network resource utilization from the network operators’ perspectives. Therefore, this paper proposes a QoS-aware flexible mobility management scheme for software-defined networking (SDN)-based mobile networks. The proposed scheme classifies flows into four classes based on the QoS requirements of services in terms of delay and loss tolerance. According to the classified service characteristics, it provides a differential handover method for each flow class to support efficient network operation without any service degradation by interacting between the forwarding plane nodes and SDN controller. The performance analysis shows that the proposed scheme enables flexible network resource utilization, satisfying the QoS requirements for each class well compared to the conventional schemes that only consider their own individual handover procedure. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Recent Developments on Multimedia Computing and Networking)
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19 pages, 2928 KiB  
Article
Two-Dimensional Histogram Shifting-Based Reversible Data Hiding for H.264/AVC Video
by Yuzhang Xu and Junhui He
Appl. Sci. 2020, 10(10), 3375; https://doi.org/10.3390/app10103375 - 13 May 2020
Cited by 5 | Viewed by 1642
Abstract
Histogram shifting (HS) has been proved to be a great success in reversible data hiding (RDH). To reduce the quality loss of marked media and the increase in file size, several two-dimensional (2D) HS schemes based on the characteristics of cover media have [...] Read more.
Histogram shifting (HS) has been proved to be a great success in reversible data hiding (RDH). To reduce the quality loss of marked media and the increase in file size, several two-dimensional (2D) HS schemes based on the characteristics of cover media have been proposed recently. However, our analysis shows that the embedding strategies used in these methods can be further optimized. In this paper, two new 2D HS schemes for RDH in H.264/AVC video are developed, one of which uses the DCT coefficient pairs with both values 0 and the other does not. The embedding efficiency of a DCT coefficient pair in different embedding modes is firstly calculated. Then, based on the obtained embedding efficiency along with the statistical distribution of DCT coefficient pairs, two better embedding strategies are proposed. The secret data is finally embedded into the pairs of DCT coefficients of the middle and high frequencies using our proposed strategies. The comparison experiment results demonstrate that our schemes can achieve enhanced visual quality in terms of PSNR, SSIM, and entropy in most cases, and the increase in file size is smaller. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Recent Developments on Multimedia Computing and Networking)
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25 pages, 5191 KiB  
Article
Sonic Watermarking Method for Ensuring the Integrity of Audio Recordings
by Robert-Alexandru Dobre, Radu-Ovidiu Preda and Marian Vlădescu
Appl. Sci. 2020, 10(10), 3367; https://doi.org/10.3390/app10103367 - 13 May 2020
Cited by 2 | Viewed by 2339
Abstract
Methods for inspecting the integrity of audio recordings become a necessity. The evolution of technology allowed the manufacturing of small, performant, recording devices and significantly decreased the difficulty of audio editing. Any person that participates in a conversation can secretly record it, obtaining [...] Read more.
Methods for inspecting the integrity of audio recordings become a necessity. The evolution of technology allowed the manufacturing of small, performant, recording devices and significantly decreased the difficulty of audio editing. Any person that participates in a conversation can secretly record it, obtaining their own version of the audio captured using their personal device. The recordings can be easily edited afterwards to change the meaning of the message. The challenge is to prove if recordings were tampered with or not. A reliable solution for this was the highly acclaimed Electrical Network Frequency (ENF) criterion. Newer recording devices are built to avoid picking up the electrical network signal because, from the audio content point of view, it represents noise. Thus, the classic ENF criterion becomes less effective for recordings made with newer devices. The paper describes a novel sonic watermarking (i.e., the watermark is acoustically summed with the dialogue) solution, based on an ambient sound that can be easily controlled and is not suspicious to listeners: the ticking of a clock. This signal is used as a masker for frequency-swept (chirp) signals that are used to encode the ENF and embed it into all the recordings made in a room. The ENF embedded using the proposed watermark solution can be extracted and checked at any later moment to determine if a recording has been tampered with, thus allowing the use of the ENF criterion principles in checking the recordings made with newer devices. The experiments highlight that the method offers very good results in ordinary real-world conditions. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Recent Developments on Multimedia Computing and Networking)
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21 pages, 4931 KiB  
Article
FAURAS: A Proxy-Based Framework for Ensuring the Fairness of Adaptive Video Streaming over HTTP/2 Server Push
by Chanh Minh Tran, Tho Nguyen Duc, Phan Xuan Tan and Eiji Kamioka
Appl. Sci. 2020, 10(7), 2485; https://doi.org/10.3390/app10072485 - 04 Apr 2020
Cited by 3 | Viewed by 3105
Abstract
HTTP/2 video streaming has gotten a lot of attention in the development of multimedia technologies over the last few years. In HTTP/2, the server push mechanism allows the server to deliver more video segments to the client within a single request in order [...] Read more.
HTTP/2 video streaming has gotten a lot of attention in the development of multimedia technologies over the last few years. In HTTP/2, the server push mechanism allows the server to deliver more video segments to the client within a single request in order to deal with the requests explosion problem. As a result, recent research efforts have been focusing on utilizing such a feature to enhance the streaming experience while reducing the request-related overhead. However, current works only optimize the performance of a single client, without necessary concerns of possible influences on other clients in the same network. When multiple streaming clients compete for a shared bandwidth in HTTP/1.1, they are likely to suffer from unfairness, which is defined as the inequality in their bitrate selections. For HTTP/1.1, existing works have proven that the network-assisted solutions are effective in solving the unfairness problem. However, the feasibility of utilizing such an approach for the HTTP/2 server push has not been investigated. Therefore, in this paper, a novel proxy-based framework is proposed to overcome the unfairness problem in adaptive streaming over HTTP/2 with the server push. Experimental results confirm the outperformance of the proposed framework in ensuring the fairness, assisting the clients with avoiding rebuffering events and lowering bitrate degradation amplitude, while maintaining the mechanism of the server push feature. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Recent Developments on Multimedia Computing and Networking)
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30 pages, 3781 KiB  
Article
Real-Time, Content-Based Communication Load Reduction in the Internet of Multimedia Things
by Iffrah Tanseer, Nadia Kanwal, Mamoona Naveed Asghar, Ayesha Iqbal, Faryal Tanseer and Martin Fleury
Appl. Sci. 2020, 10(3), 1152; https://doi.org/10.3390/app10031152 - 08 Feb 2020
Cited by 6 | Viewed by 2996
Abstract
There is an increasing number of devices available for the Internet of Multimedia Things (IoMT). The demands these ever-more complex devices make are also increasing in terms of energy efficiency, reliability, quality-of-service guarantees, higher data transfer rates, and general security. The IoMT itself [...] Read more.
There is an increasing number of devices available for the Internet of Multimedia Things (IoMT). The demands these ever-more complex devices make are also increasing in terms of energy efficiency, reliability, quality-of-service guarantees, higher data transfer rates, and general security. The IoMT itself faces challenges when processing and storing massive amounts of data, transmitting it over low bandwidths, bringing constrained resources to bear and keeping power consumption under check. This paper’s research focuses on an efficient video compression technique to reduce that communication load, potentially generated by diverse camera sensors, and also improve bit-rates, while ensuring accuracy of representation and completeness of video data. The proposed method applies a video content-based solution, which, depending on the motion present between consecutive frames, decides on whether to send only motion information or no frame information at all. The method is efficient in terms of limiting the data transmitted, potentially conserving device energy, and reducing latencies by means of negotiable processing overheads. Data are also encrypted in the interests of confidentiality. Video quality measurements, along with a good number of Quality-of-Service measurements demonstrated the value of the load reduction, as is also apparent from a comparison with other related methods. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Recent Developments on Multimedia Computing and Networking)
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10 pages, 2193 KiB  
Article
Spreading-Based Voice Encryption by Means of OVSF Codes
by Diego Renza, Dora M. Ballesteros and Estibaliz Martinez
Appl. Sci. 2020, 10(1), 112; https://doi.org/10.3390/app10010112 - 21 Dec 2019
Cited by 2 | Viewed by 2059
Abstract
This paper presents a new methodology to encrypt voice signals, in such a way that they simulate being a noise signal. The objective is to obtain a signal that does not generate suspicions about its content, while protecting the message. The process is [...] Read more.
This paper presents a new methodology to encrypt voice signals, in such a way that they simulate being a noise signal. The objective is to obtain a signal that does not generate suspicions about its content, while protecting the message. The process is based on the spread and scrambling of the signal through the use of OVSF (orthogonal variable spreading factor) codes. The security of the method is based mainly on the input value used for the randomization phase. From a computational cost point of view, the use of fixed-length codes allows for a shorter retrieval time compared to a similar method based on variable-length codes. Regarding the encrypted signal, its main characteristic is its high entropy (very close to the ideal value). Finally, in the recovery process, a signal identical to the original is obtained. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Recent Developments on Multimedia Computing and Networking)
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