Drift management and adaptive bit rate allocation in scalable video coding

This paper is concerned with performance optimization of point-to-point communication of scalable video over lossy networks. A variant of the recursive optimal per-pixel estimate (ROPE) is developed and embedded within a rate-distortion (RD) optimized mode selection scheme for SNR scalable video coding. The system allows predicting the current base layer frame from past enhancement layer frame data. Drift management and adaptive bit rate allocation are both RD optimized within this framework. The ROPE method. ensures accurate estimation (at the encoder) of the over-all decoder distortion, which is critical to the substantial performance gains achieved. A low complexity layer sequential optimization scheme is proposed as well, which approximate!; the more complex joint optimization scheme, while maintaining most of the performance gains.