Stream morphing approaches to temporal scalable video coding

Stream morphing has been previously introduced as an efficient way of simulcasting a hierarchy of single-layer descriptions of a single video sequence with different levels of quality while sharing the same frame size and rate. One application for this process was SNR scalable video coding. This paper presents two different adaptations of the stream morphing process to temporal scalability, one with bi-directional motion compensated prediction and one without. Both methods retain the attractive features of the original SNR scalable structure, notably the use of a single quantization cycle and single decoder motion-compensated prediction loop irrespective of the number of layers present and the ability to convert between single-layer and scalable forms without transcoding.