An efficient method for no-reference H.264/SVC bitstream extraction

This paper investigates the no-reference SVC bitstream extraction problem and presents an efficient solution to approximate the “optimal” extracted sub-stream. First, we introduce a linear error model to accurately estimate the distortion caused by discarding any combination of packets, even when the original sequence is not available. Then we propose a greedy algorithm to decide each packet´s priority according to its R-D impact. The priority value of packets can be stored in the bitstream and used for R-D optimized extraction. Experimental results show that our bitstream extraction method can achieve a significant PSNR gain compared to the extractors of JSVM, without computational complexity increment. Comparison with other methods also demonstrates the advantage of the proposed method.