Efficient real-time Video-in-Video insertion into a pre-encoded video stream for the H.264/AVC

This work relates to the developing and implementing of an efficient method and system for the fast real-time Video-in-Video (ViV) insertion, thereby enabling efficiently inserting a video sequence into a predefined location within a pre-encoded video stream (e.g., for inserting advertisements). The proposed ViV method enables achieving a significant performance over the conventional brute-force approaches (in terms of the bit-rate and insertion run-time) and enables supporting multiple rectangular overlays of various sizes (e.g., 16N × 16M sizes, where N and M are integers). The proposed method and system are based on dividing the video insertion process into two steps. The first step (i.e., the ViVCF encoder) includes modification of the conventional H.264/AVC video encoder to support the visual content insertion Constrained Format (CF), including generation of isolated regions without using the FMO (Frequent Macroblock Ordering) slicing, and to support the fast real-time insertion of overlays. Although, the first step is computationally intensive, it should to be performed only once even if different overlays have to be modified (e.g., for different users). The second step (i.e., the ViVCF inserter) is relatively simple (operating mostly in the bit-domain), and is performed separately for each different overlay.