Saturday, October 29, 2022

Perceptually-aware Per-title Encoding for Adaptive Video Streaming

 2022 IEEE International Conference on Multimedia and Expo (ICME)

July 18-22, 2022 | Taipei, Taiwan

Conference Website

[PDF][Slides][Video]

Vignesh V Menon,  Hadi Amirpour, Mohammad Ghanbariand Christian Timmerer
Christian Doppler Laboratory ATHENA, Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt

Abstract: In live streaming applications, typically a fixed set of bitrate-resolution pairs (known as bitrate ladder) is used for simplicity and efficiency in order to avoid the additional encoding run-time required to find optimum resolution-bitrate pairs for every video content. However, an optimized bitrate ladder may result in (i) decreased storage or delivery costs or/and (ii) increased Quality of Experience (QoE). This paper introduces a perceptually-aware per-title encoding (PPTE) scheme for video streaming applications. In this scheme, optimized bitrate-resolution pairs are predicted online based on Just Noticeable Difference (JND) in quality perception to avoid adding perceptually similar representations in the bitrate ladder. To this end, Discrete Cosine Transform(DCT)-energy-based low-complexity spatial and temporal features for each video segment are used. Experimental results show that, on average, PPTE yields bitrate savings of 16.47% and 27.02% to maintain the same PSNR and VMAF, respectively, compared to the reference HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) bitrate ladder without any noticeable additional latency in streaming accompanied by a 30.69% cumulative decrease in storage space for various representations.

 

Acknowledgments: The financial support of the Austrian Federal Ministry for Digital and Economic Affairs, the National Foundation for Research, Technology and Development, and the Christian Doppler Research Association, is gratefully acknowledged. Christian Doppler Laboratory ATHENA: https://athena.itec.aau.at/.

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