Redundancy reduction technique for dual-bitstream MPEG video streaming with VCR functionalities

With the proliferation of online video contents, it is highly desirable that video streaming systems are able to provide fast and effective video browsing. However, the predictive coding techniques adopted in current compression standards such as MPEG severely complicate these browsing operations. One approach to achieve browsing functionalities is to store an additional reverse-encoded bitstream into the server. Unfortunately, this extra bitstream approximately doubles the storage requirement of the video server. In this paper, we make use of the redundancy inherent between the forward and reverse-encoded bitstreams in order to achieve a substantia] reduction on the size of the reverse-encoded bitstream. A novel macroblock-selection strategy is then proposed in the server to access and manipulate various macroblocks from the forward and reverse-encoded bistreams to facilitate various browsing operations. Experimental results show that, as compared to the conventional dual-bitstream scheme, the new scheme significantly alleviates the storage increase due to the additional reverse-encoded bitstream.