%O Thesis %9 PhdThesis %F dvmmPub99 %A Bocheck, Paul %T Content-based Video Communication: Methodology and Applications %I Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, Columbia University %X Most traditional video communication systems consider videos as large files or long bit streams, ignoring the underlying visual content. We introduce a new content-aware framework that explores the strong correlation between video con- tent, resource (bit rate), and utility (quality). Content-based video communication is a promising approach that seamlessly integrates video compression and networking technologies aimed at overcoming current limitations of multimedia communication technology. Under the new framework, the video traditionalc and utility functions can be modeled and predicted by analyzing the video content. The resulting traditionalc and utility function models facilitate joint adaptation between dirent video streams under dynamic content changes, network conditions, and heterogeneous device capabilities. Utility functions can be used in selecting the optimal transcoding architecture in a pervasive computing environment. We demonstrate the advantages of the content-aware approach intwo applica- tions. First, content-aware models were developed for predicting video traditionalc for live video streams. The video traditionalc models were evaluated in a dynamic network resource allocation system. Our simulations have shown that, compared to existing techniques, a significant reduction ( 55% to 70%) in required network resources or up to a 60% reduction in renegotiation frequency can be achieved. Second, we have used the content-aware principle for automatic generation of utility function (sub-jective quality vs. bit rate) for live video. Our results indicate that high accuracy in estimating utility functions can be achieved. The main objective of MPEG-7 Universal Multimedia Access is to enable adap- tive transport and delivery of multimedia to various client devices with limited communication, processing, storage and display capabilities. Based on our propos- als, the media object scalability in the form of utility functions has been included in description schemes for Universal Multimedia Access (UMA) of MPEG-7. The content-aware approach can be directly used for generation of UMA descriptors. %U http://www.ee.columbia.edu/dvmm/publications/PhD_theses/bocheck-thesis.pdf %D 1999