Reduced storage transmission buffer designs for an MPEG video coder

Abstract

In MPEG video encoding, efficient buffering and rate control is especially crucial for constant bit rate (CBR) applications such as non-ATM (asynchronous transfer mode) channels and satellite communication channels. In a CBR environment, compressed video data, which is inherently variable in terms of bit rate, should be throttled to a channel with fixed rate by managing the buffer operation. At lower transmission rates, or in the case of an abrupt scene change, a dramatic increase in buffer occupancy or a buffer overflow occurs and this may cause an interruption to normal encoding and consequent degradation of video quality. An intelligent buffering algorithm is proposed for preventing buffer overflow and for smoothing out the occupancy fluctuation. The algorithm exploits major system parameters which have direct influence on one another in the MPEG encoder. The performance of the proposed algorithm has been verified on an MPEG1 encoder.