TeleMorph: A Fuzzy Logic Approach to Network-Aware Transmoding in Mobile Intelligent Multimedia Presentation Systems

Abstract

Mobile intelligent multimedia presentation systems are limited by various constraints including mobile network characteristics, mobile device capabilities, and user preferences. Those presentation systems which incorporate remotely stored multimedia rely on the bandwidth which is available during actual content transmission on the connecting mobile network. One approach to deal with this is to transcode content, thus reducing its data rate requirement, although this technique is inherently limited by the lowest acceptable quality of that media element. Alternatively, content can be transmoded to different modalities with lower bandwidth requirements. TeleMorph, a cross-modality adaptation control platform is detailed in this paper. The main premise of TeleMorph is that cross-modality adaptation decisions in mobile presentation systems must occur with primary consideration for bandwidth fluctuations. TeleMorph has been implemented as a network-aware fuzzy inference system that controls cross-modality adaptations between multimodal audio-video, audio-images, and images-text presentations, as well as unimodal audio and text presentations. Initially, a brief introduction to Intelligent Multimedia and Mobile Intelligent Multimedia is given, and related systems discussed. TeleTuras, a tourist information application implemented as a testbed for TeleMorph, is utilized for objective and subjective evaluations through its integration of six disparate test scenarios that incorporate various media types and qualities. Positive results for each evaluation technique, based on specific metrics, are also presented. In addition, future work on TeleMorph is also detailed.