Performance comparison of the SVC, WSVC, and Motion JPEG2000 advanced scalable video coding schemes

Three scalable video coding algorithms have been standardised in recent years. SVC, the scalable extension of H.264/AVC, is the most recent international standard; Motion JPEG2000 is part 3 of the image coding standard JPEG2000; and Wavelet-based SVC (WSVC) is a strong competitor in the scalable video coding field. All three of the video coding algorithms have been designed to produce scalable video bitstreams. In this paper, we investigate the difference between each coding algorithm and perform a comparative study of the coding efficiency for high quality video coding using SVC, WSVC and Motion JPEG2000. Empirical evaluation results show that the optimal choice among the three coding schemes relies on the application scenario. In particular, WSVC provides the best coding performance among the three coding algorithms. The performance of SVC and Motion JPEG2000 depends on the resolution of coded video sequences. In addition, the spatial scalability of SVC and WSVC is also investigated in the evaluation. This appears to be the first time in the literature that the performance of spatial scalability is evaluated.