R-D Hint Tracks for Low-Complexity R-D Optimized Video Streaming

Chakareski, Jacob ; Apostolopoulos, John ; Wee, Susie ; Tan, Wai-tian ; Girod, Bernd

HP Development Company

关键词: video streaming;    R-D optimization;    R-D hint tracks;   

RP-ID  :  HPL-2004-71

学科分类：计算机科学（综合）

美国|英语

来源: HP Labs

【 摘 要 】

This paper presents the concept of Rate-Distortion Hint Track (RDHT), and evaluates two specific implementations of streaming systems that employ RDHT. Characteristics of a compressed media source that are often difficult to compute in realtime but crucial to general online optimized streaming algorithms are precomputed and stored in a RDHT. In such a way, low- complexity streaming can be realized for systems that adapt to variations in transport conditions such as bandwidth or packet loss. An RDHT-based streaming system has three components: (1) an R-D Hint Track, (2) an algorithm for using the RDHT to predict the distortion for different packet schedules, and (3) a method for determining the best packet schedule. Two RDHT-based systems are presented which perform R-D optimized scheduling with dramatically reduced complexity as compared to conventional on-line R-D optimized streaming algorithms. Experimental results demonstrate that for the difficult case of R-D optimized scheduling of non-scalably coded video (H.264, I-frame followed by all P-frames), the proposed systems provide 7-12 dB gain when adapting to a bandwidth constraint and 2-4 dB gain when adapting to random packet loss, both relative to a conventional streaming system that does not take into account the different importance of individual packets. Furthermore, the proposed RDHT-based systems achieve this R-D optimized performance with a complexity comparable to that of the conventional non R-D optimized streaming system. Notes: Copyright IEEE To be published in and presented at the International Conference on Multimedia and Expo, 27-30 June 2004, Taipei, Taiwan 4 Pages