Official paper title: Keyframe Insertion for Random Access and Packet-Loss Repair in H.264/AVC, H.265/HEVC, and H.266/VVC

Sending live video over error-prone channels comes with packet-loss-repair and random-access challenges. Most existing solutions have a negative impact on end-users with reliable connections or users that do not switch channels. To minimize this impact, the keyframe-insertion technique extends a compression-efficient video stream with a companion stream solely consisting of keyframes.

This work describes the limitations and requirements to enable keyframe insertion in three generations of video coding standards (H.264/AVC, H.265/HEVC, and H.266/VVC). The results show that the general negative quality impact is low for all evaluated codecs, but for rare outliers, drift-error artifacts can become perceptible over time. Moreover, we found that this worst-case artifact type in H.264/AVC is caused by halfpel interpolation, and can be avoided by modifying or disabling subpel motion estimation.

In conclusion, this paper verified the viability of keyframe insertion in multiple compression standards to improve low-latency video distribution.