MPEG-4 FGS video streaming with constant-quality rate adaptation, prioritized packetization and differentiated forwarding

A video streaming solution with the finer granular scalable (FGS) MPEG-4 stream delivered over prioritized networks is investigated in this work. An optimal truncation strategy for constant-quality rate adaptation is first presented by embedding the rate-distortion (R-D) information based on a piecewise linear R-D model. Then, the video stream is prioritized for differentiated dropping and forwarding, where rate adaptation is dynamically performed to meet the time-varying available bandwidth. It is shown that, although the prioritized stream benefits from the prioritized network, its gain is heavily dependent on how well video source and network priorities match each other. All key components, including FGS encoding, rate adaptation and packetization, error resilieny decoding and differentiated forwarding, are seamlessly integrated into one system. By focusing on the end-to-end quality, we set both source and network parameters properly to achieve a superior performance of FGS video streaming.