Real-Time content-based access to live video data requires content analysis applications that are able to process video streams in real-time and with an acceptable error rate. Statements such as this express quality of service (QoS) requirements. In general, control of the QoS provided can be achieved by sacrificing application quality in one QoS dimension for better quality in another, or by controlling the allocation of processing resources to the application. However, controlling QoS in video content analysis is particularly difficult, not only because main QoS dimensions like accuracy are nonadditive, but also becauseboththe communication- and the processing-resource requirements are challenging.This article presents techniques for QoS-aware composition of applications for real-time video content analysis, based on dynamic Bayesian networks. The aim of QoS-aware composition is to determine application deployment configurations which satisfy a given set of QoS requirements. Our approach consists of: (1) an algorithm for QoS-aware selection of configurations of feature extractor and classification algorithms which balances requirements for timeliness and accuracy against available processing resources, (2) a distributed content-based publish/subscribe system which provides application scalability at multiple logical levels of distribution, and (3) scalable solutions for video streaming, filtering/transformation, feature extraction, and classification.We evaluate our approach based on experiments with an implementation of a real-time motion vector based object-tracking application. The evaluation shows that the application largely behaves as expected when resource availability and selections of configurations of feature extractor and classification algorithms vary. The evaluation also shows that increasing QoS requirements can be met by allocating additional CPUs for parallel processing, with only minor overhead.

This technical demonstration shows that content-based networking is a promising technology for multireceiver video streaming. Each video receiver is provided with fine grained selectivity along different video dimensions, such as region of interest, quality, colors, and temporal resolution. Efficient delivery is maintained, in terms of network utilization and processing requirements. A prototype demonstrates the feasibility of this approach and is available as open source.

Real-time content-based access to live video data requires content analysis applications that are able to process the video data at least as fast as the video data is made available to the application and with an acceptable error rate. Statements as this express quality of service (QoS) requirements to the application. In order to provide some level of control of the QoS provided, the video content analysis application must be scalable and resource aware so that requirements of timeliness and accuracy can be met by allocating additional processing resources.In this paper we present a general architecture of video content analysis applications including a model for specifying requirements of timeliness and accuracy. The salient features of the architecture include its combination of probabilistic knowledge-based media content analysis with QoS and distributed resource management to handle QoS requirements, and its independent scalability at multiple logical levels of distribution. We also present experimental results with an algorithm for QoS-aware selection of configurations of feature extractor and classification algorithms that can be used to balance requirements of timeliness and accuracy against available processing resources. Experiments with an implementation of a real-time motion vector based object-tracking application, demonstrate the scalability of the architecture.