Video compression for multicast environments using spatial scalability and simulcast coding

✍ Scribed by Wade K. Wan; Xuemin Chen; Ajay Luthra

• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 2003
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 551 KB
• Volume: 13
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0899-9457
• DOI: 10.1002/ima.10065

✦ Synopsis

Abstract

A common problem with many video transmission applications is the wide range of available bandwidths between the server and different clients. These environments require efficient multicast video service, the capability to transmit and receive the same video sequence at different resolutions. Two approaches to achieve multicast service are scalable coding (dependent bitstream coding) and simulcast coding (independent bitstream coding). One would expect scalable coding to have higher coding efficiency because a scalable coded bitstream can exploit similar information in another bitstream. This reasoning would suggest that multicast implementations should only use scalable coding for maximum coding efficiency. However, this article shows results where simulcast coding has been found to outperform spatial scalability (one type of scalable coding). In this article, methods are described to select between simulcast coding and spatial scalability for multicast video transmission. These techniques can be used to determine the proper multicast coding approach for providing service to clients with different communication links. The methodology described can also be used to construct decision regions to guide more general scenarios or adaptively switch between the two coding approaches. A number of important results were obtained that may be directly applicable to commercial multicast systems. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Int J Imaging Syst Technol 13, 331–340, 2003; Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI 10.1002/ima.10065