ROI adaptive scalable video coding for limited bandwidth wireless networks

Abstract

Much of the attention in the field of video adaptation has been directed to the Scalable Video Coding (SVC), which is the extension of the H.264/AVC standard, since the bit-stream scalability for video is a desirable feature for many multimedia applications. The need for the scalability mainly arises from the need for spatial formats, bit rates or power. To fulfill these requirements, it would be beneficial to simultaneously transmit or store video in variety of spatial/temporal resolutions and qualities, leading to the video bit-stream scalability. Regions-of-interest (ROI) coding is a desirable feature in future applications of Scalable Video Coding. For those SVC applications, users at the decoder side usually wish to receive a high-quality decoded video stream, containing the desired ROI, which should be adaptively selected from the pre-encoded scalable bit-stream. In this work, we present a novel ROI adaptive scalable video coding scheme, enabling to adaptively set desirable ROI location, size, resolution and bit-rate, according to the limited network bandwidth and predefined settings. This, in turn, will enable providing an effective rate control for multiple ROIs, thereby enabling adaptively selecting the required ROI from multiple ROIs in the scalable bit-stream, and adaptively changing ROI spatial resolution, ROI visual quality or amount of bits allocated for each ROI, according to the network bandwidth and user's settings (i.e., user's display resolution, etc.).