Investigation and Performance Evaluation of Scalable High Efficiency Video Coding

The rapid growth of the volume of multimedia data necessitates efficient compression and transmission of videos, which are requested in divergent bitrates owing to the diverse network bandwidth constraints or end device resolution/complexity requirements. Scalable video coding (SVC) is a coding paradigm that allows once-encoded video to be adapted to any desired bitrate or quality level, and thus saves the transmission and storage cost. The state-of-the-art video coding standards H.264 and HEVC incorporate scalable coding as an important extension (H.264 SVC and SHVC). In this study, we comprehensively investigated the rate-distortion and computational-complexity performance of SHVC versus H.264 SVC and wherein four typical scalability configurations were explored. Compared to H.264 SVC, SHVC achieves the same visual quality with approximately one half bitrate, higher encoding complexity and lower decoding complexity. For the selection of spatial scalability and quality scalability under a bitrate constraint, it is suggested to encode a video sequence in higher resolution followed by downsizing to the required resolution instead of direct encoding in lower resolution.