Mohammad Hosseini

Mohammad Hosseini

In the context of view-dependent point-cloud streaming in a scene, our rate allocation is "adaptive" in the sense that it priorities the point-cloud models depending on the camera view and the visibility of the objects and their distance as described. The algorithm delivers higher bitrate to the point-cloud models which are inside user's viewport, more likely for the user to look at, or are closer to the view camera or, while delivers lower quality level to the point-cloud models outside of a user's immediate viewport or farther away from the camera. For that purpose, we hereby explain the rate allocation problem within the context of multi-point-cloud streaming where multiple point-cloud models are aimed to be streamed to the target device, and propose a rate allocation heuristic algorithm to enable the adaptations within this context. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to mathematically model, and propose a rate allocation heuristic algorithm within the context of point-cloud streaming.

Mohammad Hosseini, Christian Timmerer

High-quality point clouds have recently gained interest as an emerging form of representing immersive 3D graphics. Unfortunately, these 3D media are bulky and severely bandwidth intensive, which makes it difficult for streaming to resource-limited and mobile devices. This has called researchers to propose efficient and adaptive approaches for streaming of high-quality point clouds. In this paper, we run a pilot study towards dynamic adaptive point cloud streaming, and extend the concept of dynamic adaptive streaming over HTTP (DASH) towards DASH-PC, a dynamic adaptive bandwidth-efficient and view-aware point cloud streaming system. DASH-PC can tackle the huge bandwidth demands of dense point cloud streaming while at the same time can semantically link to human visual acuity to maintain high visual quality when needed. In order to describe the various quality representations, we propose multiple thinning approaches to spatially sub-sample point clouds in the 3D space, and design a DASH Media Presentation Description manifest specific for point cloud streaming. Our initial evaluations show that we can achieve significant bandwidth and performance improvement on dense point cloud streaming with minor negative quality impacts compared to the baseline scenario when no adaptations is applied.

Mohammad Hosseini, Richard Berlin, Lui Sha et al.

Model-based development is a widely-used method to describe complex systems that enables the rapid prototyping. Advances in the science of distributed systems has led to the development of large scale statechart models which are distributed among multiple locations. Taking medicine for example, models of best-practice guidelines during rural ambulance transport are distributed across hospital settings from a rural hospital, to an ambulance, to a central tertiary hospital. Unfortunately, these medical models require continuous and real-time communication across individual medical models in physically distributed treatment locations which provides vital assistance to the clinicians and physicians. This makes it necessary to offer methods for model-driven communication and synchronization in a distributed environment. In this paper, we describe ModelSink, a middleware to address the problem of communication and synchronization of heterogeneous distributed models. Being motivated by the synchronization requirements during emergency ambulance transport, we use medical best-practice models as a case study to illustrate the notion of distributed models. Through ModelSink, we achieve an efficient communication architecture, open-loop-safe protocol, and queuing and mapping mechanisms compliant with the semantics of statechart-based model-driven development. We evaluated the performance of ModelSink on distributed sets of medical models that we have developed to assess how ModelSink performs in various loads. Our work is intended to assist clinicians, EMT, and medical staff to prevent unintended deviations from medical best practices, and overcome connectivity and coordination challenges that exist in a distributed hospital network. Our practice suggests that there are in fact additional potential domains beyond medicine where our middleware can provide needed utility.

Mohammad Hosseini, Yu Jiang, Richard R. Berlin et al.

The ultimate objective of medical cyber-physical systems is to enhance the safety and effectiveness of patient care. To ensure safe and effective care during emergency patient transfer from rural areas to center tertiary hospitals, reliable and real-time communication is essential. Unfortunately, real-time monitoring of patients involves transmission of various clinical multimedia data including videos, medical images, and vital signs, which requires use of mobile network with high-fidelity communication bandwidth. However, the wireless networks along the roads in rural areas range from 4G to 2G to low speed satellite links, which poses a significant challenge to transmit critical patient information. In this paper, we present a bandwidth-compliant criticality-aware system for transmission of massive clinical multimedia data adaptive to varying bandwidths during patient transport. Model-based clinical automata are used to determine the criticality of clinical multimedia data. We borrow concepts from DASH, and propose physiology-aware adaptation techniques to transmit more critical clinical data with higher fidelity in response to changes in disease, clinical states, and bandwidth condition. In collaboration with Carle's ambulance service center, we develop a bandwidth profiler, and use it as proof of concept to support our experiments. Our preliminary evaluation results show that our solutions ensure that most critical patient's clinical data are communicated with higher fidelity.

Mohammad Hosseini, Viswanathan Swaminathan

We demonstrate an adaptive bandwidth-efficient 360 VR video streaming system based on MPEG-DASH SRD. We extend MPEG-DASH SRD to the 3D space of 360 VR videos, and showcase a dynamic view-aware adaptation technique to tackle the high bandwidth demands of streaming 360 VR videos to wireless VR headsets. We spatially partition the underlying 3D mesh into multiple 3D sub-meshes, and construct an efficient 3D geometry mesh called hexaface sphere to optimally represent tiled 360 VR videos in the 3D space. We then spatially divide the 360 videos into multiple tiles while encoding and packaging, use MPEG-DASH SRD to describe the spatial relationship of tiles in the 3D space, and prioritize the tiles in the Field of View (FoV) for view-aware adaptation. Our initial evaluation results show that we can save up to 72% of the required bandwidth on 360 VR video streaming with minor negative quality impacts compared to the baseline scenario when no adaptations is applied.

Mohammad Hosseini, Viswanathan Swaminathan

While traditional multimedia applications such as games and videos are still popular, there has been a significant interest in the recent years towards new 3D media such as 3D immersion and Virtual Reality (VR) applications, especially 360 VR videos. 360 VR video is an immersive spherical video where the user can look around during playback. Unfortunately, 360 VR videos are extremely bandwidth intensive, and therefore are difficult to stream at acceptable quality levels. In this paper, we propose an adaptive bandwidth-efficient 360 VR video streaming system using a divide and conquer approach. In our approach, we propose a dynamic view-aware adaptation technique to tackle the huge streaming bandwidth demands of 360 VR videos. We spatially divide the videos into multiple tiles while encoding and packaging, use MPEG-DASH SRD to describe the spatial relationship of tiles in the 360-degree space, and prioritize the tiles in the Field of View (FoV). In order to describe such tiled representations, we extend MPEG-DASH SRD to the 3D space of 360 VR videos. We spatially partition the underlying 3D mesh, and construct an efficient 3D geometry mesh called hexaface sphere to optimally represent a tiled 360 VR video in the 3D space. Our initial evaluation results report up to 72% bandwidth savings on 360 VR video streaming with minor negative quality impacts compared to the baseline scenario when no adaptations is applied.

Mohammad Hosseini, Yu Jiang, Poliang Wu et al.

Software is everywhere. The increasing requirement of supporting a wide variety of domains has rapidly increased the complexity of software systems, making them hard to maintain and the training process harder for end-users, which in turn ultimately demanded the development of user-friendly application software with simple interfaces that makes them easy, especially for non-professional personnel, to employ, and interact with. However, due to the lack of source code access for third-party software and the lack of non-graphical interfaces such as web-services or RMI (Remote Method Invocation) access to application functionality, synchronization between heterogeneous closed-box software interfaces and a user-friendly version of those interfaces has become a major challenge. In this paper, we design SINk, a middleware that enables synchronization of multiple heterogeneous software applications, using only graphical interface, without the need for source code access or access to the entire platform's control. SINk helps with synchronization of closed-box industry software, where in fact the only possible way of communication is through software interfaces. It leverages efficient client sever architecture, socket based protocol, adaptation to resolution changes, and parameter mapping mechanisms to transfer control events to ensure the real-time requirements of synchronization among multiple interfaces are met. Our proof-of-concept evaluation shows there is in fact potential usage of our middleware in a wide variety of domains.