Rate-allocation for spatially scalable video coding

In this paper, we analyze the distortion propagation of temporal and spatial prediction in scalable video coding (SVC) and show that the average peak-signal-to-noise (PSNR) of SVC is a weighted combination of the bit rates assigned to all the layers. Our analysis utilizes the end user's preference for certain resolutions. In addition, we propose the rate-distortion optimization algorithm, which employs the known user preference. The results of experiments on H.264/SVC demonstrate that the algorithms outperform the approach proposed in [1], [2].