OPTE: Online Per-Title Encoding for Live Video Streaming

Current per-title encoding schemes encode the same video content at various bitrates and spatial resolutions to find an optimized bitrate ladder for each video content in Video on Demand (VoD) applications. However, in live streaming applications, a bitrate ladder with fixed bitrate-resolution pairs is used to avoid the additional latency caused to find optimum bitrate-resolution pairs for every video content. This paper introduces an online per-title encoding scheme (OPTE) for live video streaming applications. In this scheme, each target bitrate’s optimal resolution is predicted from any pre-defined set of resolutions using Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT)-energy-based low-complexity spatial and temporal features for each video segment. Experimental results show that, on average, OPTE yields bitrate savings of 20.45% and 28.45% to maintain the same PSNR and VMAF, respectively, compared to a fixed bitrate ladder scheme (as adopted in current live streaming deployments) without any noticeable additional latency in streaming.