Burst-Aware Dynamic Rate Control for H.264/AVC Video Streaming

The state-of-the-art video coding standard H.264 provides efficient compression and rate control for various video applications. However, by using the current rate control mechanism of H.264 for a video streaming, the output end users would experience a serious video distortion when a data burst happens in the input video. In order to ensure the output video quality and maintain a stable output bit stream, a new adaptive bit-allocation scheme is proposed in this paper. To be compatible with the widely used H.264, our adaptive bit allocation scheme incorporates a set of new allocation criteria in the rate control mechanism of H.264. Experimental results show that the proposed adaptive bit allocation scheme could produce a more stable output stream given a bursty video input stream.