Apple Inc.
QUALITY-SPARING CODE BURN-IN FOR VIDEO

Abstract:

Techniques are presented for inserting markers into a video stream. For each frame of an encoded video stream, disclosed techniques determine a structure of macroblocks from a code of the frame, and then, select macroblocks to be replaced from the determined structure of macroblocks. Inserting a marker into a frame carried out by replacing codes of the selected macroblocks with a code of a marker that identifies the frame. Marking frames of the video stream facilitates finding correspondence between frames from the video stream before transmission over a channel and the video stream received from the channel, based on the inserted markers. Knowledge of frame correspondence enable a video quality metric estimation based on a comparison between the found corresponding frames.