Bit allocation for scalable video coding of multiple video programs

The problem of joint rate allocation for scalable video coding (SVC) of multiple video programs is addressed in this paper. Most of the existing approaches are based on non-scalable video coding platforms, where computationally expensive encoding or transcoding is demanded to adjust the bit-rate of each video program. Different from all these works, we develop a new statistical multiplexing system, where the scalable video coding technique is applied to compress the video programs. Experiments are carried out to verify the performance of the proposed scheme by comparing it with existing methods. The results demonstrate the merit of the proposed scheme and the variation of quality between different video programs is significantly reduced.