[Apologies for multiple copies. Appreciated if you can forward to
potentially interested persons]
**************************************************************************************
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
**************************************************************************************
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
([log in to unmask])
Kuan-Ta Chen Academia Sinica, Taiwan ([log in to unmask])
Carsten Griwodz University of Oslo & Simula Research
Laboratory, Norway ([log in to unmask])
Cheng Hsin Hsu National Tsing Hua University, Taiwan
([log in to unmask])
|