The NAB Best Student Paper Award at the 2025 NAB Show was presented to Mohammad Ghasempour, a Ph.D. student and research assistant at Alpen-Adria-Universität, Klagenfurt, Austria for the paper titled, “Two-Pass Encoding for Live Video Streaming.” The paper’s co-authors were Hadi Amirpour and Christian Timmerer, also from Alpen-Adria-Universität.
Manfred von Runkel accepts the 2025 NAB BEIT Conference Proceedings Best Student Paper Award on behalf of the winner, Mohammad Ghasempour, from IEEE BTS President Samina Husain.
This is the second time the Best Student Paper Award has been presented and in partnership with IEEE: Broadcast Technology Society.
The award was announced at the Opening Session of the NAB Broadcast Engineering and Information Technology (BEIT) Conference on Saturday, April 5, 2025. The paper will be presented on Monday, April 7, 2025, at 11 a.m. in Room W220-W221 in the West Hall of the Las Vegas Convention Center.
The Abstract from the paper is shown below:
“Live streaming has become increasingly important in our daily lives due to the growing demand for real-time content consumption. Traditional live video streaming typically relies on single-pass encoding due to its low latency. However, it lacks video content analysis, often resulting in inefficient compression and quality fluctuations during playback. Constant Rate Factor (CRF) encoding, a type of single-pass method, offers more consistent quality but suffers from unpredictable output bitrate, complicating bandwidth management. In contrast, multi-pass encoding improves compression efficiency through multiple passes. However, its added latency makes it unsuitable for live streaming. In this paper, we propose OTPS, an online two-pass encoding scheme that overcomes these limitations by employing fast feature extraction on a downscaled video representation and a gradient-boosting regression model to predict the optimal CRF for encoding. This approach provides consistent quality and efficient encoding while avoiding the latency introduced by traditional multi-pass techniques. Experimental results show that OTPS offers 3.7% higher compression efficiency than single-pass encoding and achieves up to 28.1% faster encoding than multi-pass modes. Compared to single-pass encoding, encoded videos using OTPS exhibit 5% less deviation from the target bitrate while delivering notably more consistent quality.”
The 2025 NAB BEIT Conference Proceedings (including 49 technical papers from the 2025 NAB BEIT Conference) are now available for attendees and for general purchase.