Smartphone-assisted smooth live video broadcast on wearable cameras

Abstract

Wearable cameras require connecting to cellular-capable devices (e.g., smartphones) so as to provide live broadcast services for worldwide users when Wi-Fi is unavailable. However, the constantly changing cellular network conditions may substantially slow down the upload of recorded videos. In this paper, we consider the scenario where wearable cameras upload live videos to remote distribution servers under cellular networks, aiming at maximizing the quality of uploaded videos while meeting the delay requirements. To attain the goal, we propose a dynamic video coding approach that utilizes dynamic video recording resolution adjustment on wearable cameras and Lyapunov based video preprocessing on smartphones. Our proposed resolution adjustment algorithm adapts to network condition changes, and reduces the overheads of video preprocessing. Due to the property of Lyapunov optimization framework, our proposed video preprocessing algorithm delivers near-optimal video quality while meeting the upload delay requirements. Our evaluation results show that our approach achieves up to 50% reduction in power consumption on smartphones and up to 60% reduction in average delay, at the cost of slightly compromised video quality.