A scalable codec for Internet video streaming

Information systems and distributed applications for the Internet show a growing demand for real-time audiovisual services. Support for these services in the Internet protocol layer will be widely available in the near future. Nevertheless, the heterogeneous structure of the Internet remains a great obstacle for establishing real-time video services. Scalable video codecs, generating bit-streams decodable at different rates, have been proposed to address the heterogeneity problem. We present a scalable video codec based on a spatio-temporal resolution pyramid combined with lattice vector quantization as an efficient compression technique. This approach can encode embedded lower bit-rate layers at the same overall bit-rate as needed by H.263 single-layer coding. The complexity of the codec is sufficiently low to allow software-only implementations of Internet video services. This is demonstrated by means of an implemented World Wide Web video server application.