Efficient Smoothing of Robust VBR Video Traffic by Explicit Slice-based Mode Type Selection

Abstract

Variable bit rate encoding is considered to outper- form constant bit rate encoding with regard to compression gain and constancy of the video quality. The drawback is, however, that variable bit rate video streams usually exhibit a significant degree of burstiness which may result in poor multiplexing properties, buffer overflows, and large network delays. In this work we show how the explicit selection of slice mode types can effectively be used to generally avoid the use of large intracoded frames while still providing robustness against packet losses in the network. The employed encoding scheme provides a considerable smoothing of variable bit rate video traffic, resulting in less delay, less delay jitter, and less loss due to buffer overflows and late arrivals. It preserves the efficiency of variable bit rate video encoding, has little overhead, and is in accordance with current video coding standards.