Rate-distortion optimized rate shaping scheme for H.264 data partitioned video bitstream

To enable quality scalability and further improve the reconstructed video quality in rate shaping, a rate-distortion optimized packet dropping scheme for H.264 data partitioned video bitstream is proposed in this paper. Some side information is generated for each video bitstream in advance, while streaming such side information is exploited by a greedy algorithm to optimally drop partitions in a rate-distortion optimized way. Quality scalability is supported by adopting data partition instead of whole frame as the dropping unit. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme achieves a great gain in the reconstructed video quality over two typical frame dropping schemes, with the help of the fine granularity in dropping unit as well as rate-distortion optimization.