Efficient bit stream switching of H.264 coded video
Xiaosong Zhou, C.‐C. Jay Kuo · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 2005
Stream switching among compressed video streams coded at different quality levels and bit rates is examined, and two enhanced stream switching schemes for H.264 video are proposed in this work. The flexibility of the original H.264 stream switching scheme is achieved at the cost of coding efficiency by introducing primary and secondary SP/SI pictures. In contrast, no modification is made to the original compressed streams in our enhanced schemes so that coding efficiency is maintained at switching points. When switching occurs, the two new schemes use a new picture type, called the difference picture (DIFF), in different ways to compensate the mismatch of reference frames. The difference picture can be coded efficiently, and it is easy to pick a good quantization step size to meet the quality requirement. It is shown by experimental results that the two new schemes outperform the original H.264 switching scheme in the sense that they can achieve prompt stream switching without noticeable quality degradation, and a small amount of bit rate overhead is demanded only when switching occurs.