An improved method for Scalable Video Coding at low bit rates

Scalable video coding (SVC) now is becoming one extension part of the H.264/AVC standard. The bandwidth of video transmission systems is different, and the terminal units of video communication are diverse, so the SVC will be more popular because of its scalability in coding different picture size, frame rate and bit rate. However, the flexibility of SVC can't solve the conflict between the bit rate and the video quality, especially in the very low bit rate condition. In this paper, we describe a new approach to deal with this problem. We downsample the layer with high resolution, and then code the different layers with SVC. Finally, we upsample the high layer data in the decoder. Experiments show that this method can achieve better subjective quality in the low bit rate condition.