Constant-quality rate allocation for spectral fine granular scalable (SFGS) video coding by using dynamic programming approach

Spectral FGS (SFGS), modified from MPEG-4 FGS, was proposed as a scalable video coding technique that has more even image quality and is more suitable for rate allocation for video smoothness. This paper proposed a unified rate allocation algorithm based on SFGS/SFGST to make good tradeoffs between image quality, video smoothness, and temporal scalability, according to users' preferences at the buffer fullness constraint. Our rate allocation algorithm was established based on the dynamic programming (DP) technique. It becomes easy to tune the preference by adjusting weighting parameters in the optimized cost function. Experiments show that our algorithm is capable of achieving the same video smoothness as our previous work (Wen-Nung Lie et al, Proc. IEEE Int. Symp. on Circuits and Systems, pp. 880-883, 2003), having more diversity in mode selection between SFGS and SFGST, and guaranteeing no buffer overflow or underflow.