Characterization of Slice-Based H.264/AVC Encoded Video Traffic

An explicit slice-based mode type selection scheme for use in H.264/AVC has recently been developed, which preserves the coding efficiency of H.264/AVC without requiring any modifications to the standard. The novel scheme avoids the burstiness effect of standard frame-based H.264/AVC by breaking up the group of pictures (GOP) structure and each frame contains an intracoded slice at successive positions. A large intracoded frame is then only present at the beginning of each sequence. In addition, the first frame in each scene is large because of the prediction error when trying to predict the current frame based on the last frame in the previous scene. In this work a single slice-based encoded video stream is studied. The characteristics of the video stream divided into scenes using a scene change detection algorithm are investigated, looking at the marginal distributions and the correlations. A simulation study, looking at the multiplexing properties and the buffer overflow probabilities for a slice-based encoded stream compared to a frame-based encoded stream is also performed. The study shows that frame correlation is present only at small lags, and the periodic correlation structure seen in frame-based encoded video is mostly removed for the stream under study. Results from simulations show that the slice-based encoded video stream performs better than the frame-based encoded video stream in terms of lower packet loss rates and lower packet delay as long as the buffer size is small or the link utilization is moderate