H.264-Based Resolution, SNR and Temporal Scalable Video Transmission Systems

This paper presents a novel H.264-based video coding scheme for a scalable delivery system which operates over heterogeneous networks and distributes real-time streaming video to diverse types of clients. The video coding scheme is a hybrid combination of discrete wavelet transform (DWT) and H.264. In the algorithm, an input video sequence is first decomposed into a fundamental sequence and a number of orthogonal supplemental sequences using DWT. Each sequence is encoded by H.264 for effective exploitation of spatial and temporal correlations. The resulting bitstreams can be organized for layered transmission, multiple description transmission, or layered multiple description transmission, depending on whether the transportation priorization is available in the network. All these transmissions provide both the SNR and resolution scalabilities. The temporal scalability can also be attained by incorporating the proposed algorithm with the motion compensated temporal filtering (MCTF) technique. Numerical results show that the proposed algorithm has superior performance over motion JPEG2000 and MPEG4. It also outperforms the H.264-based simulcast systems subject to the same transmission rate for information delivery. Key-Words: Video Transmission, Video Coding, Multiple Description Coding, Layered Multiple Description Coding.