Seamless switching of H.265/HEVC-coded dash representations with open GOP prediction structure
The Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (DASH) enables bitrate adaptation through different representations of the same content. It is common to encode random access point (RAP) pictures at segment boundaries to support representation switching. As an open group of pictures (GOP) results into a temporary discontinuity of the video playback due to the inability to decode some pictures when switching representations, closed GOP prediction structures are normally used in DASH. This paper proposes two similar methods for using the open GOP prediction structure in DASH representations while a full picture rate is maintained also during representation switching. The first method is enabled with straightforward changes in the decoding of the High Efficiency Video Coding (H.265/HEVC) standard, whereas the second method utilizes the adaptive resolution change feature of the scalable (SHVC) extension of H.265/HEVC. Experiments show that the proposed methods outperform the use of closed GOPs by 5.6% on average in terms of Bjontegaard delta bitrate (BD-rate).