Complexity-rate-distortion evaluation of video encoding for cloud media computing

Cloud computing provides a promising solution to cope with the increased complexity in new video compression standards and the increased data volume in video source. It not only saves the cost of too frequent equipment upgrading but also gives individual users the flexibilities to choose the amount of computing according to their needs. To facilitate cloud computing for real-time video encoding, in this paper we evaluate the amount of computing resource needed for H.264 and H.264 SVC encoding. We focus on evaluating the complexity-rate-distortion (C-R-D) relationship with a fixed encoding process but under different external configuration parameters. We believe such an empirical study is meaningful for eventually realizing real-time video encoding in an optimal way in a cloud environment.