Bandwidth adaptive quality smoothing for unequal error protected scalable video streaming

Summary form only given. We address the problem of inter-GOF bit allocation for FEC-MDC protected scalable video sequences. The objective is to minimize the variation in quality while streaming over packet-loss channels with time-varying bandwidth. We present an online heuristic algorithm to adaptively allocate bits for every GOF. Before transmitting a GOF, we first estimate the current available network bandwidth, and calculate the spare channel bit rate available to be used for current GOF. Then we propose a novel AIMD (additive increase/multiplicative decrease) quality control mechanism to regulate the changing behavior of target quality: (a) if the spare channel bit rate is greater than a certain value, then we increase the target quality gracefully in a linear mode; (b) else if it is less than another certain value, then we decrease the target quality aggressively. Finally, once the target quality is determined, we allocate bits for current GOF to meet the target quality requirement by iteratively increasing or decreasing the packet length used by FEC-MDC packetization. Since this procedure is time costly, we propose a fast approximate-approaching based dual-stage iteration technique to accelerate it. Experimental results show that our techniques can achieve near constant or graceful increasing quality in a segment by segment scheme, and the improved algorithm is very efficient and can be used in real-time online computation. Besides, we also analyze the impacts of some algorithm parameters to the quality smoothing results.