H.264 Coarse Grain Scalable (CGS) and Medium Grain Scalable (MGS) Encoded Video: A Trace Based Traffic and Quality Evaluation

The Scalable Video Coding (SVC) extension of the H.264/AVC video coding standard provides two mechanisms, namely Coarse Grain Scalability (CGS) and Medium Grain Scalability (MGS), for quality scalable video encoding, which varies the fidelity (signal-to-noise ratio) of the encoded video stream. As H.264/AVC and its SVC extension are expected to become widely adopted for the network transport of video, it is important to thoroughly study their network traffic characteristics, including the bit rate variability. In this paper, the authors report on a large-scale study of the Rate-Distortion (RD) and rate Variability-Distortion (VD) characteristics of CGS and MGS.