Efficient Real-Time Video-in-Video Insertion into a Pre-Encoded Video Stream

This work relates to the developing and implementing of an efficient method and system for the fast real-time Video-in-Video (ViV) insertion, thereby enabling efficiently inserting a video sequence into a predefined location within a pre-encoded video stream. The proposed method and system are based on dividing the video insertion process into two steps. The first step (i.e., the Video-in-Video Constrained Format (ViVCF) encoder) includes the modification of the conventional H.264/AVC video encoder to support the visual content insertion Constrained Format (CF), including generation of isolated regions without using the Frequent Macroblock Ordering (FMO) slicing, and to support the fast real-time insertion of overlays. Although, the first step is computationally intensive, it should to be performed only once even if different overlays have to be modified (e.g., for different users). The second step for performing the ViV insertion (i.e., the ViVCF inserter) is relatively simple (operating mostly in a bit-domain), and is performed separately for each different overlay. The performance of the presented method and system is demonstrated and compared with the H.264/AVC reference software (JM 12); according to our experimental results, there is a significantly low bit-rate overhead, while there is substantially no degradation in the PSNR quality.