Multiple Distortion Measures for video with temporal scalability

With the recent growth in mobile device types, an interesting question that arises is how to serve media content to users with a diverse set of capabilities. Defining multiple distortion metrics, one for each type of user, allows for specialized service to each user type, which can result in significantly improved quality of service. H.264/MPEG-4 SVC is a scalable video codec that allows for easy spatial and temporal adaptation of encoded video by selecting or dropping packets. We examine using multiple distortion measures (MDM) for scheduling packets in the context of streaming temporally scalable video to users with different target frame rates. We show that gains in PSNR of multiple dB can be achieved when taking MDM into consideration for making scheduling decisions.