Combining H.264 and MPEG2 for multi-resolution video applications

The recent completion of the H.264 standard has opened new areas of research in the area of scalability. Spatial scalability for high definition sequences is particularly important, since future DVDs and broadcasts will undoubtedly be in high definition formats. In this paper, a new method of combining a low-resolution MPEG2 base layer with a high-resolution H.264 enhancement layer is explored. For a CIF sequence, the proposed scalability scheme offers bitrate savings (when compared to H.264 alone) of up to 54%, depending on the bitrate of the MPEG2 base layer.