Pareto-front optimization is crucial for addressing the multi-objective challenges in video streaming, enabling the identification of optimal trade-offs between conflicting goals such as bitrate, video quality, and decoding complexity. This paper explores the construction of efficient bitrate ladders for adaptive Versatile Video Coding (VVC) streaming, focusing on optimizing these trade-offs. We investigate various ladder construction methods based on Pareto-front optimization, including exhaustive Rate-Quality and fixed ladder approaches. We propose a joint decoding time-rate-quality Pareto-front, providing a comprehensive framework to balance bitrate, decoding time, and video quality in video streaming. This allows streaming services to tailor their encoding strategies to meet specific requirements, prioritizing low decoding latency, bandwidth efficiency, or a balanced approach, thus enhancing the overall user experience. The experimental results confirm and demonstrate these opportunities for navigating the decoding time-rate-quality space to support various use cases. For example, when prioritizing low decoding latency, the proposed method achieves decoding time reduction of 14.86% while providing Bjontegaard delta rate savings of 4.65% and 0.32dB improvement in the eXtended Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (XPSNR)-Rate domain over the traditional fixed ladder solution.

翻译：帕累托前沿优化对于解决视频流媒体中的多目标挑战至关重要，它能够识别码率、视频质量和解码复杂度等冲突目标之间的最优权衡。本文探讨了为自适应通用视频编码（VVC）流媒体构建高效码率阶梯的方法，重点在于优化这些权衡。我们研究了基于帕累托前沿优化的多种阶梯构建方法，包括穷举码率-质量法和固定阶梯法。我们提出了一个联合解码时间-码率-质量帕累托前沿，为视频流媒体中平衡码率、解码时间和视频质量提供了一个全面的框架。这使得流媒体服务能够定制其编码策略以满足特定需求，优先考虑低解码延迟、带宽效率或采取平衡方案，从而提升整体用户体验。实验结果证实并展示了在解码时间-码率-质量空间中导航以支持各种用例的可能性。例如，在优先考虑低解码延迟时，所提方法相比传统的固定阶梯解决方案，实现了14.86%的解码时间降低，同时在扩展峰值信噪比（XPSNR）-码率域上提供了4.65%的Bjontegaard delta码率节省和0.32dB的改进。