SVC overview and performance evaluation

This paper presents an overview of the new Scalable Video Coding (SVC) Amendment of H.264/AVC and the results of a performance evaluation for this new video coding specification. Whereas temporal scalability is already enabled by the existing H.264/AVC specification, the introduction of spatial and quality scalabiliy requires new coding tools. Here., the layered structure of SVC and the main new coding tools are briefly described, and an overview of the newly defined SVC profiles and levels is provided. The second part of the paper describes a subjective evaluation that was carried out, to test the efficiency of the SVC concept. The results of this evaluation show, that the coding tools introduced in the scalable extension of H.264/AVC provide a reasonable degree of spatial and quality scalability at very low costs in terms of additional bit rate. The evaluation consisted of a series of subjective quality tests and is backed up by objective PSNR measurements. The results show, that SVC supports spatial and quality scalability with a bit rate overhead of less than or about 10%, and an indistinguishable visual quality compared to state of the art single-layer coding.