A rate-control scheme for streaming video encoding

For streaming video applications, video sequences are encoded off-line in advance and are stored in a server. For these applications, the video encoder does not have the constraint to encode the video in real-time. During encoding, the bit-rate of the coded video still needs to be constrained since the end-to-end transport network often involves narrow-band constant bandwidth networks such as public switched telephone network (PSTN) or integrated service digital network (ISDN). For these nonreal-time video applications with channel bandwidth constraints, a sliding window rate-control scheme which utilizes statistics of future video frames can be used to achieve better video quality. We present a sliding window encoding scheme for streaming video applications and show the improvements over the encoding using the regular H.263.