MPEG-4 interactive image transmission on mobile thin clients

The main issue in this paper is to deploy a compressing algorithm for heterogeneous content (text, graphics, image and video) with low-complex decoding. Such an algorithm will be involved in the remote display core problem for mobile thin clients: it allows the graphical content, computed on a remote server, to be displayer on the user's thin terminal, even when the network constraints (bandwidth, errors) are very strict. The paper is structured into three parts. First, a client-server architecture is presented. On the server side, the graphical content is parsed, converted and binary encoded into the MPEG-4 (BiFS, LASeR) format. This content is further streamed to the terminal, where it is played into a simple MPEG player. Secondly, this architecture is considered as a test-bed for MPEG-4 performance assessment for various types of content (image, graphics, text). The quantitative results were focussed on bandwidth requirements and quality of experience. Finally, the conclusions are structured as a reference benchmarking of the MPEG (BiFS, LASeR) and outside (VNC) mobile remote display potential solutions.