FJND-based fuzzy rate control of scalable video for streaming applications

Multimedia Tools and Applications - A fuzzy rate controller with buffer constraint in combination with a perceptual quality controller is proposed for streaming applications of the AVC/H.264...     

Region-based rate control and bit allocation for wireless video transmission

In this paper, we propose a joint source-channel region-based rate control algorithm for real-time video transmissions over wireless systems. During the video transmission, the channel throughput available to the video encoder in the wireless systems is inherently variable, due to the retransmission of the error packets using the automatic repeat request (ARQ) error control. The variable data rate of the wireless system is characterized by the packet-level Gilbert two-state Markov Model, the parameters of which are extracted from the statistical properties of the channel information obtained from the wireless channel simulator. The proposed algorithm adopts a fast but effective block-based segmentation method to extract the regions of interest. Unlike traditional bit allocation methods used in the region/content-based rate control, the algorithm exploits the most effective criteria "coding qualities" as quantitative factors to directly control bit allocation among different regions so as to achieve better visual quality in the regions of interest. The computational complexity of the algorithm is low making it suitable for real-time applications. Compared with the MPEG-4 rate control algorithm, our algorithm can effectively enhance the perceptual quality for the regions of interest and significantly reduce the number of frame skipping; thereby, improve the smoothness of the video.     

New bufferless rate control for high efficiency video coding

Multimedia Tools and Applications - As a crucial component of video compression, rate control regulates the encoding bitrates of compressed bitstreams to meet channel bandwidths while obtaining...     

Visual sensitivity guided bit allocation for video coding

A video bit allocation technique adopting a visual distortion sensitivity model for better rate-visual distortion coding control is proposed in this paper. Instead of applying complicated semantic understanding, the proposed automatic distortion sensitivity analysis process analyzes both the motion and the texture structures in the video sequences in order to achieve better bit allocation for rate-constrained video coding. The proposed technique evaluates the perceptual distortion sensitivity on a macroblock basis, and allocates fewer bits to regions permitting large perceptual distortions for rate reduction. The proposed algorithm can be incorporated into existing video coding rate control schemes to achieve same visual quality at reduced bitrate. Experiments based on H.264 JM7.6 show that this technique achieves bit-rate saving of up to 40.61%. However, the conducted subjective viewing experiments show that there is no perceptual quality degradation. EDICS-1-CPRS, 3-QUAL.     

WuKong: a practical video streaming service based on native BitTorrent and scalable video coding

Many researches on peer-to-peer video streaming have focused on dealing with highly dynamic, high-churn P2P environment. Most of P2P streaming protocols were modified from a P2P file sharing protocol. Inspired by the high performance on peer-to-peer file sharing of BitTorrent, we propose an overlaying streaming mechanism on the native BitTorrent protocol and realize a practical P2P video streaming service, called WuKong. WuKong not only takes advantages of BitTorrent but also combines the video scalability of layered video coding. In this paper, we depict an overlaid streaming mechanism in WuKong and an adaptive layer-downloading process to balance between the video quality and bandwidth utilization on heterogeneous peers. WuKong is carried out by using an open-sourced library of the BitTorrent protocol, coding schemes of the Windows Media Video (WMV), and the Scalable Video Coding (SVC). We measured and compared the service quality of end-users served by WuKong on heterogeneous peers. In addition, we evaluated the effectiveness of WuKong with peers that are randomly joining and leaving the P2P network. The results show that WuKong not only provides high quality P2P video streaming services but also supports different scaling abilities over heterogeneous devices.     

Low-delay rate control for real-time H.264/AVC video coding

This paper presents an efficient rate control scheme for the H.264/AVC video coding in low-delay environments. In our scheme, we propose an enhancement to the buffer-status based H.264/AVC bit allocation method. The enhancement is by using a PSNR-based frame complexity estimation to improve the existing mean absolute difference based (MAD-based) complexity measure. Bit allocation to each frame is not just computed by encoder buffer status but also adjusted by a combined frame complexity measure. To prevent the buffer from undesirable overflow or underflow under small buffer size constraint in low delay environment,the computed quantization parameter (QP) for the current MB is adjusted based on actual encoding results at that point. We also propose to compare the bits produced by each mode with the average target bits per MB to dynamically modify Lagrange multiplier (/spl lambda//sub MODE/) for mode decision. The objective of QP and /spl lambda//sub MODE/ adjustment is to produce bits as close to the frame target as possible, which is especially important for low delay applications. Simulation results show that the H.264 coder, using our proposed scheme, obtains significant improvement for the mismatch ratio of target bits and actual bits in all testing cases, achieves a visual quality improvement of about 0.6 dB on the average, performs better for buffer overflow and underflow,and achieves a similar or smaller PSNR deviation.     

A frame-level encoder rate control scheme for transform domain Wyner-Ziv video coding

Available distributed video coding codecs are mostly based on decoder rate control scheme where the parity bits for decoding can be achieved over a feedback channel. Meanwhile, the frequent requests over feedback channel increase the transmission delay. The feedback-free distributed video coding, relying on encoder rate control in literatures, has overcome the aforementioned shortcoming. However, when performing parity bitrate estimation and other operations, the feedback-free distributed video coding systems based on bit-plane usually require high precision of bitrate estimation and high quality of side information at the encoder. In this paper, we propose a frame-level distributed video coding system based on encoder rate control. The innovations include three parts: 1) an adaptive coding mode selection algorithm is proposed, which utilizes both temporal and spatial correlation and reduces the complexity of encoder; 2) a bit-plane rearrangement method is adopted, which makes the coding rate on each bit-plane homogeneous and effectively reduces the accuracy requirement of the parity bitrate prediction and improves the efficiency of rate estimation; 3) a frame-level parity bitrate estimation scheme is presented to enhance the efficiency of rate estimation on the basis of a look-up table. Numerical results verify that the proposed scheme remarkably improves the rate distortion performance of distributed video coding at low bitrate.     

Battery-aware rate adaptation for extending video streaming playback time

Multimedia streaming applications are computation and network intensive that put a high demand on battery usage of mobile devices. Battery usage forms an important metric in user satisfaction, as increased battery consumption results in faster battery depletion and eventually leads to battery outage. In this paper, we propose an adaptation technique, referred as Battery-Aware Rate Adaptation (BARA) scheme, which adapts to the appropriate bit rate to prolong the battery lifetime. BARA considers both the wireless channel conditions, as well as the device’s battery level, to determine the best transmission rate for optimizing the mobile battery consumption. Actual experiment and simulation results corroborate that compared to the conventional techniques, BARA can save more than 40% of battery power, while extending the video playback time by 20%.

     

Throughput optimization for video streaming proxy servers based on video staging

A video streaming proxy server needs to handle hundreds of simultaneous connections between media servers and clients. Inside, every video arrived at the server and delivered from it follows a specific arrival and delivery schedule. While arrival schedules compete for incoming network bandwidth, delivery schedules compete for outgoing network bandwidth. As a result, a proxy server has to provide sufficient buffer and disk cache for storage, together with memory space, disk space and disk bandwidth. In order to optimize the throughput, a proxy server has to govern the usage of these resources. In this paper, we first analyze the property of a traditional smoothing algorithm and a video staging algorithm. Then we develop, based on the smoothing algorithm, a video staging algorithm for video streaming proxy servers. This algorithm allows us to devise an arrival schedule based on the delivery schedule. Under this arrival and delivery schedule pair, we can achieve a better resource utilization rate gracefully between different parameter sets. It is also interesting to note that the usage of the resources such as network bandwidth, disk bandwidth and memory space becomes interchangeable. It provides the basis for inter-resource scheduling to further improve the throughput of a video streaming proxy server system.

A low-complexity and efficient encoder rate control solution for distributed residual video coding

Multimedia Tools and Applications - Existing encoder rate control (ERC) solutions have two technical limitations that prevent them from being widely used in real-world applications. One is that...     

A systematic rate controller for MPEG-4 FGS video streaming

This paper proposes a systematic rate controller (SRC) for content-aware streaming of MPEG-4 FGS video over the Internet. An active layer dropping technique is proposed to provide both coarse-grain and fine-granularity scalability of smooth quality adaptation to bandwidth fluctuations and bit-rate variations of streamed video over a general time-scale. The smooth quality adaptation is realized through the mode and state transition of a state machine that implements the SRC. The SRC effectively uses available bandwidth and client buffer by forward-shifting the FGS video stream. It provides protection to video segments with important content by introducing a content-aware priority-based layer model for the MPEG-4 FGS video stream. RID="*" ID="*" The work reported in this paper was performed when this author was working at Microsoft Research Asia as a research intern.     

Efficient algorithm for very low bit rate embedded image coding

The authors propose an embedded wavelet-based image coding algorithm that exploits both the inter- and intra-subband correlations among the wavelet coefficients. The proposed coding algorithm is based on spatial orientation trees (SOT) in which the basic unit is a block of m times n coefficients in contrast to a single coefficient in the set partitioning in hierarchical trees (SPIHT) algorithm. Each SOT has a root node (a block of m times n coefficients) in the LL-subband with the child and descendent blocks in the high frequency subbands. Thus it fuses the features of both block- and tree-based coding algorithms into a single algorithm. Performance of the proposed method is compared (in terms of rate-distortion performance) with the other state-of-the-art coding algorithms including the JPEG2000 for popular test images. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm has a better coding efficiency over the other coders at very low bit rates. Also, compared with SPIHT it reduces the elements of the auxiliary lists, thereby reducing the memory requirements. In addition, the encoder of the proposed algorithm is significantly faster than that of the SPIHT, but with a slight increase in its decoder complexity.     

低速率语音编解码专用处理器设计

本文给出一种基于编码速率600bps的高质量声码器算法的专用处理器设计。介绍了语音编解码算法原理,专用处理器的体系结构,汇编器的开发和算法的移植。采用软硬件协同设计的方法,大大降低了算法的存储复杂度和运算复杂度,并在电路中验证了声码器地正确性。     

基于TD-SCDMA的视频码率动态调整策略

通过对基于TD-SCDMA无线视频监控系统的研究,提出了一种无线传输环境下的视频码率动态调整策略。针对TD-SCDMA信道低带宽、高时延、高误码率的特征,该策略可以根据实时网络环境动态调整码率,以便视频数据能够适应其传输。经过TD-SCDMA无线视频系统的实际应用,证明本策略能够有效解决由于TD-SCDMA信道特征给视频传输带来的不利影响。     

基于小波变换的MPEG视频流预测模型

提出了一种基于小波变换的MPEG视频流的预测模型,该模型对原始数据做Haar小波变换以后,充分考虑尺度系数和乘子的不同统计特性,对尺度系数和乘子采用不同的预测模型分别预测,最终通过多重分形小波模型建模过程合成MPEG视频流序列。利用仿真和数学分析的方法对预测模型在刻画MPEG视频流的主要统计特性方面进行性能分析,从误差、数据的概率分布特性以及自相似特性等方面,证实了该预测模型的优越性能。