Summary
International Conference on Emerging Technologies for Communications
2020
Session Number:IB2
Session:
Number:IB2-1
Development and Field Tests of a Drone Video Streaming System using Scalable Video Coding and Multiple Paths
Koichi Nihei,
pp.-
Publication Date:2020/12/2
Online ISSN:2188-5079
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Summary:
Nowadays, drones are widely used in various applications. Live video is streamed from a drone to a monitoring center for safety operation and carrying out tasks. To achieve high-quality video streaming on a best-effort network, adaptive video streaming methods which control video bitrate in accordance with communication speed have been proposed. However, these methods are insufficient for drone video streaming systems because the speed at which drones fly causes communication speed to fluctuate drastically. To resolve this problem, the author developed an improved adaptive video streaming method that uses the video coding method scalable video coding (SVC). The structure of a video stream encoded by SVC consists of a base layer and multiple enhancement layers. By dynamically changing the bitrates of the layers and the number of layers to be sent, the video bitrate can be adjusted to the communication speed even on a widely fluctuating network. In addition, the method uses multiple communication paths (multi-path) at the same time and optimizes the distribution of video packets among the paths. This enables high-bitrate and low-latency video streaming. Field tests conducted in Fukushima, Japan and Palangka Raya, Indonesia verified the effectiveness of the proposed method. This paper reports the results of the tests.