Adaptation of Scalable Video Coding to packet loss and its performance analysis

SVC (Scalable Video Coding) is a new video coding standard to provide convergence media service in heterogeneous environments with different networks and diverse terminals through spatial-temporal-quality combined flexible scalabilities. This paper presents the analysis of performance on packet loss in the delivery of SVC over IP networks and an efficient adaptation method to packet loss caused by buffer overflow. In particular, SVC with Medium Grained Scalability (MGS) as well as spatial and temporal scalabilities is addressed in the consideration of packet-based adaptation since finer adaptation is possible with a sufficient numbers of quality layers in MGS. The effect on spatio-temporal quality due to the packet loss of SVC with MGS is evaluated. In order to minimize quality degradation resulted by packet loss, the proposed adaptation of MGS based SVC first sets adaptation unit of Access Unit (AU ) or Group of Picture (GOP ) corresponding to allowed delay and then selectively discards packets in order of importance in terms of layer dependency. In the experiment, the effects of packet loss on quantitative spatio-temporal qualities are analyzed and the effectiveness of the proposed adaptation to packet loss is shown.