Transcoding Internet content for heterogeneous client devices

Abstract

There is a growing diversity of client devices that have access to the Internet. However, much of the content on the Internet cannot be handled by the devices that have limited communication, processing, storage and display capabilities. In order to improve the utility of a wide range of client devices, we propose a network-based solution for transcoding Internet content. The system uses an InfoPyramid for representing and transcoding video, images, audio and text. The InfoPyramid manipulates the content along the dimensions of fidelity and modality, and aggregates the methods for content analysis, translation, filtering and selection. The InfoPyramid utilizes a policy engine, which incorporates user and publisher preferences, various transcoding policies, device descriptions, and real-time network constraints in order to adapt the Internet content to the client devices.