Video transmission adopting scalable video coding over time-varying networks

Recently, there is an active research about a new emerging video coding standard, scalable video coding (SVC). SVC adopts a layered coding scheme to generate multi-layered bitstream for heterogeneous environments. In addition to the layered coding, SVC performs temporal prediction using the hierarchical B picture scheme in order to provide temporal scalable representation of input sequences. Since the coding order of the hierarchical B picture scheme is different from that of conventional temporal prediction schemes, the layer-switching algorithm considering the different coding order has to be developed. In this paper, we first investigate the problems of layer switching in SVC and propose an algorithm that enables the SVC decoder to cope with layer switching caused by the bandwidth variation of networks. With the proposed algorithm, the SVC decoder can decode the time-varying sub-bitstream without modification of encoder. We confirm the proposed methods through the experiments.