A LOW-COMPLEXITY APPROACH FOR INCREASING THE GRANULARITY OF PACKET-BASED FIDELITY SCALABILITY IN SCALABLE VIDEO CODING

Abstract

Packet-based fidelity scalability (PFS) is a desirable fea-ture in many video coding or transmission applications. Any realization of PFS in a hybrid video coding approach, however, requires suitable concepts for controlling drift and for generating sufficiently small increments in bit rate in order to allow progressive refinements of perceptual quality relative to a given base layer quality. This paper addresses those problems in the context of the scalable video coding (SVC) extension of H.264/AVC. We pre-sent an algorithmically simple but yet remarkably well-performing method for packet-based fidelity scalability that is maximally consistent with the existing entropy cod-ing design of H.264/AVC, allows sufficiently small incre-ments in bit rate, and has been adopted as a normative element of SVC. We also discuss the benefits of the key picture concept of SVC in view of our proposed PFS ap-proach. Experimental results are presented that demon-strate the effectiveness of our method for a few selected SVC conforming encoder configurations. Index Terms — SVC, H.264/AVC, fidelity scalability,