Quality-smoothed encoding for real-time video streaming applications

For video streaming applications, it is highly desired that video signals can be encoded in not only good average quality but also smooth video quality or less quality fluctuations among adjacent frames. In general, two-pass encoding schemes are often employed to achieve consistent video quality given the bandwidth constraints. However, for real-time video applications, it is impossible to encode a video sequence twice and thus global statistical information for the entire video sequence is not available. In this paper, we jointly consider the video smoothing technique and the bandwidth constraint by adoptively adjusting the bit rate allocated to the current frame with a sliding window. Experimental results show that our proposed scheme can achieve both smooth video quality and high average PSNR performance.