Multi-User Real-Time Wireless Video with Perceptual Constraints

The current military and civil ground based surveillance and reconnaissance is characterized by a large number of sensor assets, feeding resource constrained analysis nodes, and constrained by extremely limited transport bandwidth. The complexity of such systems is captured by the Networks of Systems (NoS) concept which use tools from wireless engineering and control theory. In this paper, the role of perceptual quality constraints on video-based NoS is investigated. An algorithm to determine the feasible set of nodes and optimal packet schedule via a Markov decision process, given their perceptual constraints and channel qualities is proposed. The H.264/SVC codec is used for compression, while the visual information fidelity pixel-domain (VIFP) full-reference image quality assessment model is used to measure perceptual quality. The algorithm is implemented in custom C++ software with over-the-air transmissions using 802.11 WLAN hardware. Real-time encoding is done for over-the-air transmission of the video. The results indicate that gains of 10-30% can be realized for a three node system.