Performance evaluation of H.264/MPEG4 scalable video coding depending on spatial resolution

In this paper, we evaluate the performances of SNR scalability provided by the scalable extension of the H.264/MPEG4 advanced video coding standard, also known as Scalable Video Coding (SVC), depending on the spatial resolution of the input video sequence. Preliminary simulation results show that SVC performances are directly related to spatial resolution of input video. In particular, video quality gains obtained by adding the enhancement layer to the base one, in terms of PSNR, are inferior when considering high resolution video contents in comparison with low ones, for similar bit rate ratios. We also propose a discussion on the consequences of this result on transmission schemes.