A scalable VideoGIS system for GPS-guided vehicles

doi:10.1016/j.image.2004.11.002

Signal Processing: Image Communication

Volume 20, Issue 3, March 2005, Pages 205-218

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.image.2004.11.002 Get rights and content

Abstract

A VideoGIS system aims at combining geo-referenced video information with traditional geographic information in order to provide a more comprehensive understanding over a spatial location. Video data have been used with geographic information in some projects to facilitate a better understanding of the spatial objects of interest. This paper presents an on-going VideoGIS project, in which scalable geo-referenced video and geographic information (GI) are transmitted to GPS-guided vehicles. The hypermedia, which contains cross-referenced video and GI, are organized in a scalable (layered) fashion. The remote users can request, through 3G mobile devices, the abundant information related to the objects of interest, while adapting to heterogeneous network condition and local CPU usage. Available bandwidth estimation technique is used in the adaptive video transmission.

Introduction

The geographic information system (GIS) has been playing an important role in our daily life. It helps the system management of electricity, irrigation, water distribution, forest, route planning, transportation, etc. [4]. The map, either paper or digital, is the most widely used product of a GIS system. A map often contains multiple layers of information, such as streets, landmarks, roads, rivers, etc.

As mobile computing environments are getting more popular due to the rapid advance of mobile communication technologies and widespread of mobile devices such as PDAs, new geographic information systems such as mobile GIS are being implemented for telematics applications. It is feasible today for a GPS-guided vehicle to receive geographic information (GI) through wireless communication. If the network bandwidth is allowed, additional layers of geographic information can be transmitted to the receiving device with a more detailed display.

When viewing a constantly updated map in a moving vehicle through a mobile device, such as a PDA, a user may get interested in viewing a related video corresponding to current spatial location or other spatial objects of interest. The user can switch to video mode after a target location is specified through the user interface. Also, the user can navigate from the video to other GI or video by clicking the hyperlink within the video frame.

By linking video data and geographic information, users can obtain more realistic information about geographic objects in addition to some information that can be obtained using traditional GIS systems. It is very important to transmit video data and geographic information to heterogeneous users efficiently because most mobile devices in mobile communication environment have some limitations, such as varying network bandwidth, small display sizes, small memory size, etc. We are building a VideoGIS system, where we construct all the hypermedia data including geo-referenced video and GI and disseminate them to vehicles within a specific area. In this paper, we present the prototype of this system, including data preparation, organization, and adaptive rate transmission based on scalable layered coding and real-time end-to-end available bandwidth estimation.

The rest of this paper is organized as follows. We review some of the related research and implementation in Section 2. In Section 3, we present the framework of our VideoGIS system and how the geo-referenced video is constructed. Adaptive video transmission is discussed in Section 4. Descriptions of our primitive experiment results are presented in Section 5. Finally, Section 6 concludes the paper and discusses some of our future work.

Section snippets

Video-based geographical information system (VideoGIS)

Efforts to link video data and geographic information as a kind of hypermedia were started by Aspen Movie Map Project [8] to provide more visual and realistic data to users. The project uses four cameras mounted on a truck and took an image every 3 m on the streets of Aspen. An interactive, dynamic map has been built using videodisc technology to engage the user in a simulated “drive” through an unfamiliar space. The driver, or map reader, is presented with either sparsely sampled sequences of

VideoGIS system framework

Our VideoGIS project is focusing on providing rich and cross-referenced video and geographic information to the mobile devices of GPS-guided vehicles. Currently the project has collected plenty of raw data from Dunsan city in Korea using a specially remodeled van, called 4-S Van. The video data are geo-referenced, i.e., they contain the spatial location information and also all the coordinates of the geographic object of interest in each frame. There were two cameras installed on the van to

Available bandwidth estimation

We use delay trend detection technique to estimate the available bandwidth [9].

Suppose there are N links from the sender to the receiver, $i = 1, \dots, N$ . The capacity of link i is C_i. The sender sends out a probe of multiple packets, $k = 1, \dots, M$ , at a known rate (pr) from time a until time b. The size of packet k is $S_{k}$ . Denote the cross traffic (excluding the probe packets) through each link between time a and b as $T_{i} [a, b]$ . The path's end-to-end available bandwidth in time interval $[a, b]$ can be defined as $A$

Primitive experiment results

We have conducted some primitive experiments using current available video and GI data. For the proposed adaptive video transmission, we implemented and tested the BIC protocol through various network conditions including LAN, Between ISPs, University to ISP, Across-Pacific, etc. The original video files are down-sampled to CIF and QCIF format to fit the limited display area of the typical mobile devices. The sender runs as a server and waits for receivers’ connection. After being connected to

Conclusions and future work

We have presented a prototype of VideoGIS system for GPS-guided vehicles. Huge volume of geo-referenced video data and geographic information (GI) data have been collected for Dunsan city, Korea. The system can provide detailed and realistic information regarding to a specific location within Dunsan city. The mobile devices in the vehicles can real-time adaptively receive the video data depending on its end-to-end available bandwidth from the server to the receiver. The system supports

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