Content-Adaptive Coding and Delay-Aware Rate Control for a Multi-Camera Wireless Surveillance Network

Abstract

One of the challenges in supporting multiple video streams over a small wireless network is appropriate rate control at each video source. Two rate adaptation approaches are proposed in this paper, to meet both quality and latency requirements while achieving overall efficiency. Encoding frame rate is adapted according to the importance of the video contents; quantization parameter for each frame is dynamically adjusted based on complexity of the current frame and past observations of end-to-end delay. Simulation results for a multi-camera surveillance application show the effectiveness of the proposed network-adaptive rate control in a live coding and streaming scenario. Compared to conventional methods combining TCP-friend rate control (TFRC) at the transport layer and video encoder rate control at the application layer, the proposed scheme improves the average PSNR of received video by 0.3-3.5 dB while also achieving less fluctuation in the video quality