Ultra-fast live video-in-video insertion for H.264/AVC

In this work, an ultra-fast live video-in-video (ViV) insertion scheme is presented, according to which a predefined video content, such as a video advertisement, can be inserted in real-time into a predefined location within a pre-encoded video stream. According to the proposed scheme, the video insertion process is performed in two steps. The first step includes the modification of a conventional H.264/AVC video encoder to support the visual content insertion by using either the Flexible Macroblock Ordering (FMO) technique or by using the Variable Length Coding (VLC)/Variable Length Decoding (VLD). In the second step, the ViV insertion is performed separately for each overlay, while operating in a compressed domain. The presented scheme provides significant improvements in terms of both the bit-rate and insertion run-time: the time period of the proposed ViV insertion process is extremely fast, i.e. up to 8000 times faster compared to JM 17.2 reference software and more than 100 times faster compare to the commercial VSS® (Vanguard Software Solutions®) Streaming Codec Pack 4.5. Also, the bitrate overhead is very low.