Self-Adaptive Video Encoder: Comparison of Multiple Adaptation Strategies Made Simple

This paper presents an adaptive video encoder that can be used to compare the behavior of different adaptation strategies using multiple actuators to steer the encoder towards a global goal, composed of multiple conflicting objectives. A video camera produces frames that the encoder manipulates with the objective of matching some space requirement to fit a given communication channel. A second objective is to maintain a given similarity index between the manipulated frames and the original ones. To achieve the goal, the software can change three parameters: the quality of the encoding, the noise reduction filter radius and the sharpening filter radius. In most cases, the objectives - small encoded size and high quality - conflict, since a larger frame would have a higher similarity index to its original counterpart. This makes the problem difficult from the control perspective and makes the case study appealing to compare different adaptation strategies.