Dynamic and Distributed Adaptation of Scalable Multimedia Content in a Context-Aware Environment

The seamless access to rich multimedia content on any device and over any network, usually known as Universal Multimedia Access, requires interoperable description tools and adaptation techniques to be developed. To address this, MPEG-21 introduces an adaptation framework, which provides several mechanisms for making adaptation decisions according to usage environment and adapting multimedia contents in a coding format independent way. This paper gives an overview of the European FP6 project DANAE which not only implements and extends the existing MPEG-21 adaptation mechanisms but also kicked off several new standardization activities in the area of dynamic and distributed adaptation and resource conversion. MPEG-21 DIP enables static stream selection which is a first step in a series of adaptations. The existing BSD-based adaptation mechanisms enable the efficient implementation of generic adaptation engines, which can be used for existing and future coding formats. These mechanisms were extended to enable dynamic and distributed adaptation. Alternatively to the BSD-based adaptation, resource conversion was investigated which does not rely on scalable media and allows adaptations at the scene level. MPEG-21, Digital Item Adaptation, Resource Conversion, Digital Item Processing, Distributed Adaptation, QoS, QoE, Scalable coding, Efficient use of network/radio