Rate-smoothed schedule with tolerable data dropping for video coding stream

Abstract

Most algorithms of smoothing schedule compute the required bit rate of video transmission to satisfy all the transmitted data. In this paper, our proposed tolerable data dropping algorithm can adjust transmitting data to fit available bit rate. MPEG-4 with fine grained scalability (FGS) can support partial data dropping to adapt to available bandwidth network. The algorithm is based on the minimum variance bandwidth allocation (MVBA) algorithm proposed by Salehi et al. to compute the bit rate such that still ensuring that the buffer never underflows and overflows for MPEG-4 FGS streams under the limited bandwidth resource. We prove that our proposed algorithm, named MVBADP, is smoother than the MVBA algorithm. The experimental results show the peak rate, the number of rate changes, and the ratio of total dropping data, and the PSNR for four test sequences with different content characteristics. They are varied by buffer sizes and tolerable dropping ratios. We found that the MVBADP algorithm can reduce the peak rate and the number of changes when the transmitted data are dropped by tolerable dropping ratio, especially on the video sequences with the high motion and complex texture characteristic and larger size change of the consecutive frame.