Combining bitstream switching and FGS for H.264 scalable video transmission over varying bandwidth networks

A novel system combining the FGS scalability with stream switching based on H.264's SP frame concept is introduced. For high bandwidth variations, our proposed system switches from a low-quality stream to a higher-quality stream whereas low bandwidth variations are accommodated by using only the corresponding FGS enhancement layer. Experimental results show that our proposed system outperforms FGS by 2.9 dB and the H.264 based stream switching approach by 1.5 dB on average.