A two-stage H.264/AVC encoder for video streaming with fast reference picture selection

Reference Picture Selection (RPS) is a powerful error control technique for video streaming, but it consumes significant computational resources at streaming time. In this paper we present a two-stage H.264/AVC-compatible video encoder that enables the use of RPS at significantly reduced computational cost, and with only a minor penalty in coding performance. Further, we show how the compression performance gap between our two-stage encoder and the conventional H.264/AVC encoder can be eliminated by using additional disk space at the server.