Progressive fine granular scalable (PFGS) video using advance-predicted bitplane coding (APBIC)

A novel architecture for scalable video coding is proposed in this paper. In this scheme video data frames are encoded into multiple layers, including a base layer of relatively lower quality video and multiple enhancement layers of increasingly higher quality video. Unlike conventional layered video coding schemes or the Fine Granular Scalable (FGS) scheme in MPEG-4, only the base layer is predicted from the reconstructed base layer of a reference frame in the proposed scheme, and all enhancement layers are predicted from an enhancement layer of the reference frame. A higher quality reference makes the motion compensation more accurate for enhancement layers to improve the coding efficiency. Also a single enhancement reference layer eliminates the fluctuations of enhancement layer coefficients if otherwise using multiple references of different quality. On the other hand, in order to keep the bandwidth adaptation and error recovery properties, the single enhancement layer reference has to be alternatively at different enhancement layers for each prediction frame. Experimental results show that the proposed coding scheme can improve coding efficiency up to 1.3 dB compared with FGS scheme in MPEG-4