A hybrid temporal-SNR fine-granular scalability for Internet video

Transmission of video over bandwidth varying networks like the Internet requires a highly scalable solution capable of adapting to the network condition in real-time. To address this requirement, scalable video-coding schemes with multiple enhancement layers have been proposed. However, under this multiple-layer paradigm, the transmission bit-rate of each layer has to be predetermined at encoding time. Consequently, the range of bit-rates that can be covered with these compression schemes is limited and often lower than, or different from, the desired range required at transmission time. In this paper, a novel scalable video-coding framework and a corresponding compression method for Internet video streaming are introduced. Building upon the MPEG-4 SNR fine-granular-scalability (FGS) approach, the proposed framework provides a new level of abstraction between the encoding and transmission process by supporting both SNR and temporal scalability through a single enhancement layer. Therefore, our proposed approach enables streaming systems to support full SNR, full temporal, and hybrid temporal-SNR scalability in real-time depending on the available bandwidth, packet-loss patterns, user preferences, and/or receiver complexity. Moreover, our experiments revealed that the presented FGS temporal-SNR scalability has similar or better PSNR performance than the multilayer scalability schemes. Subsequently, an Internet video streaming system employing the proposed hybrid FGS-temporal scalability structure is introduced, together with a very simple, yet effective, rate-control that performs the tradeoffs between individual image quality (SNR) and motion-smoothness in real-time. The hybrid temporal-SNR scalability presented in this paper has been adopted in the MPEG-4 standard to support video-streaming applications.