Rate Shaping for video with frame dependency

Abstract

Streaming of preceded video, which is both source- and channel-coded, over packet-loss networks faces challenges of the time-varying packet loss rate and fluctuating bandwidth. Rate shaping has been proposed to reduce the bit rate of a preceded video bitstream to adapt to the real-time bandwidth variation. In our earlier work, rate shaping was extended to consider not only the bandwidth but also the packet loss rate variations. In practice, the reconstructed result of the previous frame will affect the following frames if the video is predictive coded, and/or the error concealment method performed at the receiver utilizes temporal information. However, none prior work considers rate shaping for pre source- and channel-coded video with such frame dependency. In order to incorporate frame dependency into the rate shaping process, we propose to send the location (and mean) of the corrupted macroblock back to the sender, and use such feedback information to determine the distortion measure in the rate-distortion optimized rate shaping. Experiments have shown improved performance with the aids of the feedback information.