Rate-Distortion Analysis and Quality Control in Scalable Internet Streaming

Rate-distortion (R-D) modeling of video coders has always been an important issue in video streaming; however, few of the traditional R-D models and their performance have been closely examined in the context of scalable (FGS-like) video. To overcome this shortcoming, the first half of the paper models rate-distortion of DCT-based fine-granular scalable coders and derives a simple operational R-D model for Internet streaming applications. Experimental results demonstrate that this R-D result, an extension of the classical R-D formula, is very accurate within the domain of scalable coding methods exemplified by MPEG-4 FGS and H.264 progressive FGS. In the second half of the paper, we examine congestion control and dynamic rate-scaling algorithms that achieve smooth visual quality during streaming using the proposed R-D model. In constant bitrate (CBR) channels, our R-D based quality-control algorithm dramatically reduces PSNR variation between adjacent frames (to less than 0.1 dB in sample sequences). Since the Internet is a changing environment shared by many sources, even R-D based quality control often cannot guarantee nonfluctuating PSNR in variable-bitrate (VBR) channels without the help from an appropriate congestion controller. Thus, we apply recent utility-based congestion control methods to our problem and show how a combination of this approach and our R-D model can benefit future streaming applications