Abstract
Many media processing applications create a load that varies significantly over time. Hence, if such an application is assigned a lower processing-time budget than needed in its worst-case load situation, deadline misses are likely to occur. This problem can be dealt with by designing media processing applications in a scalable fashion. A scalable media processing application can run in multiple qualities, leading to correspondingly different resource demands. The problem we consider is to find an accompanying quality control strategy, which minimizes both the number of deadline misses and the number of quality changes, while maximizing the quality of processing. We present an initial approach to the above problem by modeling it as a Markov decision process (MDP). Our model is based on measuring relative progress at milestones. Solving the MDP results in a quality control strategy that can be applied during runtime with only little overhead. We evaluate our approach by means of a practical example, which concerns a scalable MPEG-2 decoder.
Similar content being viewed by others
REFERENCES
Bril, R. J., M. Gabrani, C. Hentschel, G. C. van Loo, and E. F. M. Steffens, “QoS for consumer terminals and its support for product families,” in Proc. International Conference on Media Futures (ICMF), Florence, Italy, May 2001a, pp. 299–302.
Bril, R. J., C. Hentschel, E. F. M. Steffens, M. Gabrani, G. C. van Loo, and J. H. A. Gelissen, “Multimedia QoS in consumer terminals,” in Proc. IEEE Workshop on Signal Processing Systems (SIPS), Antwerp, Belgium, September 2001b, pp. 332–343.
Gelissen, J. H. A., “The ITEA project EUROPA, a software platform for digital CE appliances,” in Proc. International Conference on Media Futures (ICMF), Florence, Italy, May 2001, pp. 157–160.
Hentschel, C., R. J. Bril, M. Gabrani, L. Steffens, K. van Zon, and S. van Loo, “Scalable video algorithms and dynamic resource management for consumer terminals,” in Proc. International Conference on Media Futures (ICMF), Florence, Italy, May 2001, pp. 193–196.
Lan, T., Y. Chen, and Z. Zhong, “MPEG2 decoding complexity regulation for a media processor”, in Proc. Fourth IEEE Workshop on Multimedia Signal Processing (MMSP), Cannes, France, October 2001, pp. 193–198.
Peng, S., “Complexity scalable video decoding via IDCT data pruning,” in Digest of Technical Papers IEEE International Conference on Consumer Electronics (ICCE), Los Angeles, CA, June 2001, pp. 74–75.
Puterman, M. L., Markov Decision Processes: Discrete Stochastic Dynamic Programming, Wiley Series in Probability and Mathematical Statistics, Wiley-Interscience, New York, 1994.
Slavenburg, G. A., S. Rathnam, and H. Dijkstra, “The TriMedia TM-1 PCI VLIW mediaprocessor,” in Proc. Eighth IEEE Symposium on High-Performance Chips, Hot Chips 8, Stanford, CA, August 1996, pp. 171–177.
van der Wal, J., Stochastic Dynamic Programming, PhD thesis, Mathematisch Centrum, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, 1980.
White, D. J., Markov Decision Processes, John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 1993.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Wüst, C.C., Verhaegh, W.F. Quality Control for Scalable Media Processing Applications. Journal of Scheduling 7, 105–117 (2004). https://doi.org/10.1023/B:JOSH.0000014067.74332.74
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1023/B:JOSH.0000014067.74332.74