Traffic and Quality Characterization of the H.264/AVC Scalable Video Coding Extension

The recent Scalable Video Coding (SVC) extension to the H.264/AVC video coding standard has unprecedented compression efficiency while supporting a wide range of scalability modes, including temporal, patial, and quality (SNR) scalability, as well as combined spatiotemporal SNR scalability. The traffic characteristics, especially the bit rate variabilities, of the individual layer streams critically affect their network transport. The authors study the SVC traffic statistics, including the bit rate distortion and bit rate variability distortion, with long CIF resolution video sequences and compare them with the corresponding MPEG-4 Part 2 traffic statistics.