Interactive Streaming of Sequences of High Resolution JPEG2000 Images

The JPEG2000 image coding system was created with the intention of superseding the original JPEG standard, using a novel wavelet-based method. The main advantage of JPEG2000 is the flexibility of its code-stream, which provides new functionality related to the interactive transmission of images. For this task, JPEG2000 uses the JPIP protocol, which enables real-time spatial random access while the retrieved image is progressively displayed (streaming). The standard also foresees the compression and transmission of sequences of images by repeating this approach for each image. In this framework, this paper presents the Continue data-flow control strategy, a JPIP-compliant solution for the interactive streaming of sequences of images that are transmitted over time-varying communication channels. In this context, the random fluctuation of the capacity of the transmission channel over the time forces the clients to prefetch a minimal amount of the code-stream of each image of the beginning of the transmitted sequence before the playback starts, and the server to decide, in real-time, which amount of the code-stream of each compressed image is going to be transmitted. The estimated channel capacity is performed by clients and the rate-control at the server is straightforward, resulting in a highly scalable image retrieval system. The experiments conducted in this study demonstrate that the proposed method keeps a constant playback frame-rate under severe variations of the channel capacity, even when short prefetch times are used.