Recent trends in online mutimedia education for heterogeneous end-user devices based on Scalable Video Coding

This paper overviews the most recent trends and research directions with regard to presenting Region-of-Interest (ROI) multimedia content by using Scalable Video Coding (SVC), which can be especially useful for online multimedia education services in the heterogeneous end-user environment. The advent of a plurality of cheaper and more powerful devices, having the ability to play, create, and transmit video content, has led to a dramatic increase in the multimedia content distribution, especially for engineering educational purposes on both wireline (e.g., cable) and wireless networks. Also, the reduction of cost of digital video cameras along with the development of user-generated content video sites (e.g., YouTube™) stimulated a new user-generated video content sector and made very strong demands for the high-quality and low-delay video communication, especially for online education courses and lectures in the engineering field. In addition, much of the attention in the field of video/multimedia adaptation is currently directed to the SVC, which is an extension of the H.264/AVC video standard. A major requirement for the SVC is to enable encoding of a high-quality video stream that contains one or more subset video streams, each of which can have for example, various temporal and spatial resolutions (i.e., QCIF, CIF, 720p, 1080p) to be presented on heterogeneous user devices, such as mobile/cellular phones, laptops, personal computers, TV sets, and the like. In this work, we focus on online multimedia engineering education by employing Region-of-Interest SVC, thereby enabling to provide an ultimate solution for streaming educational multimedia content to a plurality of heterogeneous end-user devices.