An Empirical Measurement of the Coding Efficiency in Scalable Video Coding

Video compression techniques can be classified into scalable and non-scalable. Scalable coding is more suitable in variable band-width scenarios because it improves the quality of the reconstructed video. On the other hand, the scalability has a cost in terms of coding efficiency and complexity. This paper describes a JPEG2000-and- MCTF-based fully scalable video codec (FSVC) and analyzes a set of experiments to measure the cost of the scalability, comparing two different FSVC encoders, called open-loop FSVC and closed-loop FSVC. In the open-loop version of FSVC, the encoder uses the original images to make the predictions. The closed-loop version generates the predictions with reference images identical to those obtained by the decoder at a given bit-rate. Numerical and visual results demonstrate a small loss of the coding efficiency for the open-loop scheme. Moreover, the inclusion of the closed-loop loop increases the complexity of the encoder and produces poor performance at high bit-rates.