Bit Rate Control for Real - Time Multipoint Video Conferencing

BIT RATE CONTROL FOR REAL-TIME MULTIPOINT VIDEO CONFERENCING Xiaoping Hu, MS University of Pittsburgh, 2003 With the rapid development of video compression and network technology, real-time video communications has become a popular part of our daily life. Rate control is needed to satisfy the expectation of high quality and to make it possible to transmit over limited bandwidth. The objective of this thesis is to design a rate control scheme for a real-time TranscodingCompositing Multipoint Video Conferencing System, which operates exclusively in the DCT domain. In this Transcoding-Compositing system, the mode of the composited frame should firstly be decided before encoding the composited image. A mode decision method relying on Karhunen-Loeve scene change detection is proposed. A new linear source Rate-Distortion model is developed in the ρ domain ( ρ is the percentage of zero), based on which rate control scheme is designed. The designed rate control scheme is parted into three levels: Frame Level, Sub-frame Level, and Macroblock Level. Frame Level rate control decides the bit budget for each frame based on the buffer fullness. Sub-frame Level rate control optimizes the distribution of the bit budget among the decimated sub-images. Based on the linear source model, Macroblock Level rate control carries out an adaptive procedure to precisely control the number of encoding bits for each sub-image.