A frame-level MLP-based bit-rate controller for real-time video transmission using VVC standard

Real-time video transmission is one of the most popular applications that are included in the versatile video coding (VVC) standard. However, real-time applications are encountered with practical limitations, including the buffer size and available bandwidth. In these applications, the buffer overflow and underflow should be strictly prevented and also the bit-rate fluctuation should be suppressed. In this paper, a video bit-rate controller is proposed that completely conforms with the constraints of real-time applications. The proposed controller is based on a multi-layer perceptron (MLP) neural network which estimates the proper quantization parameter (QP) modification at the frame level. The buffer occupancy is directly included in the QP derivation process for robust buffer control. Experimental results show that the proposed bit-rate controller fulfils the buffering constraints and controls the bit-rate accurately. The average bit-rate error of the proposed method is 0.29% while providing a low initial buffering delay of about 0.21 s. Also, the rate-distortion analysis shows that the performance of the proposed method is close to those of the conventional algorithms.