Enhanced H.264/AVC stream switching over varying bandwidth networks

This paper proposes an efficient video stream switching scheme among compressed video streams coded at different quality levels and bit rates. The conventional stream switching scheme in H2.64/AVC is effective in switching, but degrades the compression efficiency of the transmitted stream even if the switching operation does not take place. In the proposed scheme, no modification is made to the original compressed streams so the compression efficiency is maintained at switching points. Consequently switching points can be assigned flexibly in our efficient scheme without noticeable bit rate overhead. It is shown by experimental results that the proposed scheme outperforms the conventional switching scheme.