Empirical evaluation of layered video coding schemes

Video coding for Internet applications faces major challenges. Due to the heterogeneity of the network, users with very different access bandwidths to the Internet want to receive videos of the best possible quality. A good coding scheme for layered video pursues the following major goal: it maximises the subjective visual quality at a given bandwidth. In this article, we present four different techniques for video layering. The work focuses on an evaluation carried out on 30 test probands. The objective was twofold: finding both a suitable metric for automatic video quality assessment, as well as the best layering technique. The experimental results lead us to pronounce recommendations on the metric for automatic video quality assessment, and on a best video layering technique with regard to human perception.