Systematic Overview of Savings versus Quality for H.264/SVC

Abstract: The demand for efficient video coding techniques has increased in the recent past, resulting in the evolution of various video compression techniques. SVC (Scalable video coding) is the recent amendment of H.264/AVC (Advanced Video Coding), which adds a new dimension by providing the possibility of encoding a video stream into a combination of different sub streams that are scalable in areas corresponding to spatial resolution, temporal resolution and quality. Introduction of the scalability aspect is an effective video coding technique in a network scenario where the client can decode the sub stream depending on the available bandwidth in the network. A graceful degradation in the video quality is expected when any of the spatial, temporal or the quality layer is removed. Still the amount of degradation in video quality has to be measured in terms of Quality of Experience (QoE) from the user’s perspective. To measure the degradation in video quality, video streams consisting of different spatial and temporal layers have been extracted and efforts have been put to remove each layer starting from a higher dependency layer or the Enhancement layer and ending up with the lowest dependency layer or the Base layer. Extraction of a temporally downsampled layer had challenges with frame interpolation and to overcome this, temporal interpolation was employed. Similarly, a spatial downsampled layer has been upsampled in the spatial domain in order to compare with the original stream. Later, an objective video quality assessment has been made by comparing the extracted substream containing fewer layers that are downsampled both spatially and temporally with the original stream containing all layers. The Mean Opinion Scores (MOS) were obtained from objective tool named Perceptual Evaluation of Video Quality (PEVQ). The experiment is carried out for each layers and also for different test videos. Subjective tests were also performed to evaluate the user experience. The results provide recommendations to SVC capable router about the video quality available for each layer and hence the network transcoder can transmit a specific layer depending on the network conditions and capabilities of the decoding device.