Real-time system for adaptive video streaming based on SVC

This paper presents the integration of Scalable Video Coding (SVC) into a generic platform for multimedia adaptation. The platform provides a full MPEG-21 chain including server, adaptation nodes, and clients. An efficient adaptation framework using SVC and MPEG-21 Digital Item Adaptation (DIA) is integrated and it is shown that SVC can seamlessly be adapted using DIA. For protection of packet losses in an error prone environment an unequal erasure protection scheme for SVC is provided. The platform includes a real-time SVC encoder capable of encoding CIF video with a QCIF base layer and fine grain scalable quality refinement at 12.5 fps on off-the-shelf high-end PCs. The reported quality degradation due to the optimization of the encoding algorithm is below 0.6 dB for the tested sequences.