An efficient H.264 based fine-granular-scalable video coding system

H.264, with its superior coding efficiency and network friendly design, has emerged as the newest international video standard and is expected to become the preferred codec for video broadcasting. Presently, there is an effort to add scalability to H.264, in order to offer a solution to network congestion and bandwidth variations. Proposals range from scalable subband extension to introduction of FGS to the H.264 standard. We propose a novel structure for the FGS layer that uses 4/spl times/4 integer transform, instead of 8/spl times/8 discrete cosine transform (DCT), so that the same transform is used for both layers. We also propose a novel hierarchical algorithm to code macroblock header of FGS layer that uses less bits than the standard FGS algorithm and significantly increases the coding efficiency. When compared with the original FGS structure, the proposed structure uses 70% less bits for macroblock headers, has less complexity and has an increased PSNR of 0.7 dB on average.