Multidimensional SVC bitstream adaptation and extraction for rate-distortion optimized heterogeneous multicasting and playback

In this paper, we propose an optimal SVC bitstream extraction scheme that can produce scalable layer representations for different viewing devices scattered over a multicasting network with diverse link bandwidth. Our scheme can determine optimal extraction orders/paths that are implementable at different multicasting nodes by performing successive steps of multiple adaptation. In addition to this basic scheme, we also develop an unambiguous denotation for the optimal extraction paths, and an algorithm for deducing the optimal extraction paths for less capable devices through path truncation. Extensive SVC encoding and adaptation experiments have been performed using JSVM 9 and both objective quality metrics (PSNR and MSE) as well as subjective metric (VQM). The experiment results showed that our scheme works well if convexity of R-D performance is maintained throughout the SVC bitstream.