RBF-based VBR controller for real-time H.264/SVC video coding

Abstract

In this paper we propose a novel VBR controller for real-time H.264/SVC video coding. Since consecutive pictures within the same scene often exhibit similar degrees of complexity, the proposed VBR controller allows for just an incremental variation of QP with respect to that of the previous picture, so preventing unnecessary QP fluctuations. For this purpose, an RBF network has been carefully designed to estimate the QP increment at each dependency (spatial or CGS) layer. A mobile live streaming application scenario was simulated to assess the performance of the proposed VBR controller, which was compared to a recently proposed CBR controller for H.264/SVC. The experimental results show a remarkably consistent quality, notably outperforming the reference CBR controller.