Optimal Mode Selection in Internet Video Communication: An End-To-End Approach

We present an end-to-end approach to generalize the classical theory of R-D optimized mode selection for point-to-point video communication. We introduce a. notion of global distortion by taking into consideration of both the path characteristics and the receiver behavior, in addition to the source behavior. We derive, for the first time, a set of accurate global distortion metrics for any packetization scheme. Equipped with the global distortion metrics, we design an R-D optimized mode selection algorithm to provide the best trade-off between compression efficiency and error resilience. As an application, we integrate our theory with point-to-point MPEG-4 video conferencing over the Internet. Simulation results conclusively demonstrate that our end-toend approach offers superior performance over the classical approach for Internet video conferencing.