Video rate control strategies for cloud gaming

•We discuss about the features of game players’ attention.•We explore the ways to make use of them and improve transmission efficiency.•We raise some methods of extracting ROI and key frames from gaming videos.•We propose a Macro-block level rate control scheme based on ROI and key frames.•Experimental results show that our method outperforms others.

Cloud gaming, also called gaming on demand, is a new kind of service that provides real-time video game experience to the players over the Internet. Although cloud gaming services are getting more and more popular recently, its performance is highly limited by the network bandwidth and latency. This work makes use of the unique characteristics of human visual system (HVS) of video game players to improve bandwidth efficiency. In this work, discussions about the characteristics of game players’ HVS are conducted. The discussions can be further extended to all interactive video on demand systems. Then, some schemes of extracting region of interest and key frames from gaming videos are raised. Based on that, a Macro-block level rate control scheme is proposed based on region of interest and scene-change detection. The simulation results show that, under the same bandwidth constraint, the video quality of proposed method outperforms other methods.