Rate-distortion optimized video streaming with smooth quality constraint

In this paper, we propose an approach to integrate smooth quality constraint into a rate-distortion optimized scalable video streaming system over variable bandwidth networks. The constraint is based on the analysis of video content complexity. In order to preserve smooth video quality when the network bandwidth and video data rate vary, the scheme takes into account degree of motion in each frame in an R-D optimized framework to determine the packet scheduling policy. An implementation based on MPEG-4 FGS codec is presented in this paper. Initial experiments show that the proposed approach can outperform the traditional scalable streaming systems under harsh network conditions.