Complexity-aware adaptive bit-rate control with dynamic ROI pre-processing for scalable video coding

We present a novel efficient complexity-aware adaptive bit rate control with dynamic Region-of-Interest pre-processing (pre-filtering) for the Scalable Video Coding (SVC), which is an extension of H.264/AVC. According to the proposed approach, we adaptively vary various parameters of the SVC pre-filters, such as standard deviations and a number of filters for the dynamic pre-processing of a transition region between the ROI and background, thereby enabling to dynamically adjust the desired SVC settings. Our adaptive bit-rate control is based on an SVC computational complexity-rate-distortion (C R-D) analysis, thereby adding a complexity dimension to the conventional Region-of-Interest SVC rate-distortion analysis. As a result, the ROI SVC visual presentation quality is significantly improved, which can be especially useful for various resource-limited devices, such as mobile devices. The performance of the presented adaptive ROI SVC pre processing scheme is evaluated and tested in detail, further comparing it to the Joint Scalable Video Model reference software (JSVM 9.19) and demonstrating significant improvements both in quality and bit-rate.