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JND-aware Two-pass Per-title Encoding Scheme for Adaptive Live Streaming
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  • Vignesh V Menon ,
  • Prajit T Rajendran ,
  • Christian Feldmann ,
  • Klaus Schoeffmann ,
  • Mohammad Ghanbari ,
  • Christian Timmerer
Vignesh V Menon
Christian Doppler Laboratory ATHENA

Corresponding Author:[email protected]

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Prajit T Rajendran
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Christian Feldmann
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Klaus Schoeffmann
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Mohammad Ghanbari
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Christian Timmerer
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Abstract

Adaptive live video streaming applications utilize a predefined collection of bitrate-resolution pairs, known as a bitrate ladder, for simplicity and efficiency, eliminating the need for additional run-time to determine the optimal pairs for each video. These applications do not incorporate two-pass encoding methods due to increased latency. However, an optimized bitrate ladder could result in lower storage and delivery costs and improved Quality of Experience (QoE). This paper presents a Just Noticeable Difference (JND)-aware constrained Variable Bitrate (cVBR) Two-pass Per-title encoding Scheme (JTPS) designed specifically for live video streaming. JTPS predicts a content- and JND-aware bitrate ladder using low-complexity features based on Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) energy and optimizes the constant rate factor (CRF) for each representation. The effectiveness of JTPS is demonstrated using the x265 open-source video encoder, with an average bitrate reduction of 18.80% and 32.59% for the same PSNR and VMAF, respectively, compared to the standard HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) bitrate ladder using Constant Bitrate (CBR) encoding. The implementation of JTPS also resulted in a 68.96% reduction in storage space with a negligible impact on streaming latency.
2023Published in IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology on pages 1-1. 10.1109/TCSVT.2023.3290725