An Anatomy of SVC for Full HD Video Streaming

The continuous developments and improvements of network infrastructure along with the growing number of modern smartphones, tablets and smart TVs have led to an increasing popularity of multimedia applications, such as video conferencing, video streaming and mobile TV. Towards delivering video stream to diverse devices over a heterogamous network, scalable video coding (SVC) has received many research attentions. SVC is an extension of H.264/AVC that allows a video streaming service provider to encode a high quality video into a number of scalable layers. The receivers of the stream may decode the video at the appropriate quality level that is suitable for their hardware/software capabilities and network connections. Nevertheless, compared to single layer H.264/AVC, the de facto standard for many commercial streaming service providers such as YouTube, SVC is not widely deployed, mostly due to its overhead in terms of bit rate and complexity. In this paper, we conduct a thorough study on the performance of SVC for full HD video streaming. Our performance analysis identifies good and bad uses of SVC, quantifies the coding overhead, and benchmarks the SVC video quality under different spatial, temporal, and quality settings. Through the use a set of carefully selected and diverse video sequences, we also identify the types of video that can benefit from SVC.