A novel low-complexity packetization method for fine-granularity scalable (FGS) video streaming

Pre-packetization is extensively used in commercial streaming systems to support simultaneously accessing the same content by a large number of audiences while controlling the server load. However, for FGS video, such a pre-packetization scheme may limit the fine-grain scalability provided by FGS and partially sacrifice FGS advantages. To deal with this issue, a novel low-complexity packetization method is proposed in this paper for streaming FGS video. It consists of two stages: off-line pre-packetization and on-line rate-shaping. The off-line prepacketization adopts the rate-distortion optimization and dependency elimination strategy proposed in our previous paper, while the on-line rate shaping is attained by exploiting the prominent properties of the pre-packetized video packets and directly truncating the transport packets. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method significantly reduces the streaming complexity with only a slightly performance loss compared with the streaming system with on-line packetization.