Delay-distortion optimization for content-adaptive video streaming

We propose a new pre-roll delay-distortion optimization (DDO) framework that allows determination of the minimum pre-roll delay and distortion while ensuring continuous playback for on-demand content-adaptive video streaming over limited bitrate networks. The input video is first divided into temporal segments, which are assigned a relevance weight and a maximum distortion level, called relevance-distortion policy, which may be specified by the user. The system then encodes the input video according to the specified relevance-distortion policy, whereby the optimal spatial and temporal resolutions and quantization parameters, also called encoding parameters, are selected for each temporal segment. The optimal encoding parameters are computed using a novel, multi-objective optimization formulation, where a relevance weighted distortion measure and pre-roll delay are jointly minimized under maximum allowable buffer size, continuous playback, and maximum allowable distortion constraints. The performance of the system has been demonstrated for on-demand streaming of soccer videos with substantial improvement in the weighted distortion without any increase in pre-roll delay over a very low-bitrate network using AVC/H.264 encoding.