Rate and distortion modeling for real-time MGS coding and adaptation

Scalable Video Coding (SVC) is the extension of the Advanced Video Coding standard (H.264/AVC) providing video compression with spatial, temporal and quality scalability. Scalability can be exploited in order to provide a better video quality for the end user in video transmission over wireless networks. In this paper we develop a parametric Rate Distortion (R-D) model for Medium Grain Scalability (MGS) SVC depending only on two indexes describing the spatial and temporal complexity of video sequences. The two indexes can be easily obtained from the original raw video, thus enabling real time video adaptation for transmission over channels with variable bandwidth such as wireless channels. The results from simulations show that the use of the proposed model for rate adaptation of multiple-videos sharing a common channel results in an end user video quality comparable to that obtained by using a more accurate non-real time rate distortion model.