ACM TOMM: Delay-Sensitive Video Computing in the Cloud Call for Papers
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CALL FOR PAPERS
ACM Transactions on Multimedia Computing, Communications, and Applications (ACM TOMM)
Special Issue on
DELAY-SENSITIVE VIDEO COMPUTING IN THE CLOUD
http://tomm.acm.org/ACM-TOMM-SI-Delay-Sensitive-Video-Computing-in-Cloud.pdf
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OVERVIEW
=========
Video applications are now among the most widely used and a daily fact
of life for the great majority of Internet users. While presentational
video services such as those provided by YouTube and NetFlix dominate
video data, conversational video services such as video conferencing,
multiplayer video gaming, telepresence, tele-learning, collaborative
shared environments, and screencasting, as well as visual control
systems such as tele-operation or remote-controlled drones, also have
significant usage and tremendous potential. With the advent of both
mobile networks and cloud computing, we are seeing a paradigm shift,
where the computationally-intensive components of these conversational
video services are moving to the cloud, and the end user’s mobile
device is used as an interface to access the services. By doing so,
even mobile devices without high-end graphical and computational
capabilities can access a high fidelity application with high-end
graphics.
What distinguishes conversational video systems from other video
systems is the fact that they are highly delay sensitive, and this
sensitivity is a major challenge for operating them in the
cloud. While buffering and interruptions of even a few seconds are
tolerated in presentational video applications, conversational video
applications require a much tighter end-to-end delay (input-to-display
delay), usually in the range of 150 to 250 milliseconds, beyond which
the application will "fail" since it is not responding to user
interactions fast enough. The great majority of recent proposals for
cloud-based encoding of video mostly use the well-known Hadoop and
Map/Reduce technologies. However, the processing time of these
techniques cannot meet the tight delay thresholds of conversational
video scenarios, where the video must be processed "live" as it
is coming. Delay-sensitive processing and rendering of video in the
cloud has therefore become an emerging area of interest.
Running conversational video applications in the cloud introduces
several challenges: First, video requires high bandwidth, especially
if the scene must be sent to multiple users. Second, conversational
video is sensitive to network latencies that impair the interactive
experience of the application. Third, the mobility of today’s users
poses another set of challenges. Due to the heterogeneity of end
users' devices, the cloud has to adapt the video content to the
characteristics and limitations of the client's underlying network
or end device. These include limitations in the available network
bandwidth, in the client device's processing power, memory, display
size, battery life, or the user’s download limits or roaming fees
as per his/her mobile subscription plan. While some of these
restrictions are becoming less problematic due to rapid progress in
mobile hardware technologies, battery life in particular and download
limit to some extent are still problems that must be seriously
considered. Furthermore, consuming more bandwidth or computational
power, even if available, means consuming more battery.
For this special issue, we seek original research papers that report
on new approaches, methods, systems, and solutions that overcome the
above shortcomings. Potential topics of interest include, but are not
limited to:
* Methods to speed up video coding and video streaming at the cloud
side
* Methods to decrease video bandwidth requirements while
maintaining visual quality
* Energy-efficient cloud computing for video coding and rendering
at the server side
* Efficient capturing, processing, and streaming of user
interactions to the cloud, such as traditional, Kinect-like, Wii-like,
gesture, touch, and similar mobile and touch-based user interactions
* Virtualization of large volume user inputs (e.g., depth sensor
video) in the cloud
* Remote desktop, screen sharing, and Game as a Service (GaaS)
* Video-based telepresence, collaborative shared environments,
cloud gaming, and augmented reality
* Optimizing cloud infrastructure and server distribution to
efficiently support globally distributed and interacting users
* Resource allocation and load balancing in the cloud for optimized
application support
* Network routing, software defined networking (SDN),
virtualization, and on-demand dynamic control of the cloud
infrastructure
* Network and end-system mechanisms to reduce latency in
cloud-based interactive services
* Adaptive video streaming according to network/user’s
limitations
* Quality of Experience (QoE) studies and improvements for
delay-sensitive video computing in the cloud: user-cloud and user-user
interactions, effects of delay and visual quality limitations, and
methods to improve them
* Novel architectures and designs based on cloud video rendering,
such as cloudlet-assisted systems, for video conferencing,
telepresence, tele-learning, collaborative shared environments,
screencasting, video gaming, augmented reality, and other
conversational video applications and systems
IMPORTANT DATES
================
Initial Paper Submission: August 20, 2017
Decision Notification: October 20, 2017
Revision Due: December 20, 2017
Acceptance Notification: February 15, 2018
Camera-Ready Version Due: February 28, 2018
Online Publication: April/May 2018
MANUSCRIPT SUBMISSION AND REVIEWING PROCESS
============================================
Submissions should contain original material that has not been
previously published in a journal, nor is currently under review by
another journal. If material in the submission was previously
published in a conference paper, the new submission must (i)
technically extend the published version by at least 25% new material,
(ii) explicitly cite the prior conference paper, and (iii) explain in
an accompanying cover letter what has been extended in the new
submission.
Submitted papers will be evaluated based on their originality,
presentation, contributions, and relevance to the theme of this
special issue, and will be reviewed by at least three independent
experts in the field.
Manuscripts must be prepared according to the ACM TOMM guidelines
(available at http://tomm.acm.org/authors.cfm), and submitted online
using the ACM Manuscript Central System (available at
https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/tomm). Please make sure to select
this special issue when reaching the manuscript "Type" step in
the submission process.
GUEST EDITORS
==============
Maha Abdallah Pierre & Marie Curie University, France (Maha.Abdallah@lip6.fr)
Kuan-Ta Chen Academia Sinica, Taiwan (swc@iis.sinica.edu.tw)
Carsten Griwodz University of Oslo & Simula Research Laboratory, Norway (griff@simula.no)
Cheng Hsin Hsu National Tsing Hua University, Taiwan (chsu@cs.nthu.edu.tw)