Pros and cons of fine granular scalability-based MPEG-2 compressed-domain processing

The pros and cons of FGS-based MPEG-2 video transcoding are examined. An existing solution for elastic storage of media (Barrau, 2002) is reviewed. Its shortfalls in terms of picture drift are identified and addressed by means of proposing a modified transcoding architecture, which is then compared to SNR-based MPEG-2 multilayer transcoding. It is shown that the FGS-based MPEG-2 video transcoder has the advantage of simplified transcoding and decoding architectures. However, the SNR-based MPEG-2 transcoder is shown to produce higher quality reconstructed images with superior rate-distortion performance.