Multimedia Communication and Scalable Video Coding

Scalable video coding (SVC) is the extension of the H.264/AVC standard. Because of the variety of video transmission systems, storage systems and computing capabilities, video bit stream need to adapt the various needs of different terminals and network conditions, while SVC is a highly attractive solution to the problems above, it provides network-friendly scalability at a bit stream level with a moderate increase in decoder complexity relative to single layer H.264/AVC. This paper first gives an overview presenting the main functionalities of SVC, then introduces the principles and key technologies: temporal down-sampling, coding with hierarchical B frames, and inter-layer prediction. Finally, the paper provides a performance analysis of SVC based on JSVM9.18. For reference, we compare two types of scalability by doing experiments, the results can be important references in practical application.