On realtime remote display of a digital video recording system

Abstract

Digital video recording (DVR) systems have become popular following the rapid development of digital video devices and video coding techniques. A DVR is a computerized surveillance system that supports all the features of a traditional videotape system by using digital cameras, motion detector, pan-and-tilt controls, capture cards and a computer. It can save the captured frames as hard-disk files, which can be played back later. Another advantage of DVR is that it supports realtime remote display of the captured video frames while the digital recording is working at the same time. We present research on the realtime remote display of a DVR system, especially the congestion control algorithm for the multi-channel transmission case. Our proposed congestion control algorithm can achieve efficient and stable realtime transmission of multichannel captured video sequences for a wide range of bandwidth capacity. The algorithm is also TCP-friendly as it follows the additive increase multiplicative decrease (AIMD) scheme. Several trade-offs are made to make the system fit for the special purpose of remote surveillance.