International Journal of Computer Applications (0975 – 8887)
Volume 36– No.8, December 2011
30
H.264/SVC Performance and Encoder Bit-
stream Analysis
Amina Kessentini, Imen Werda, Amine Samet, Mohamed Ali Ben Ayed, Nouri Masmoudi
Laboratory of Electronics and Information Technologies (LETI)
University of Sfax, National school of Engineering
B.P.W, 3038 Sfax, TUNISIA
ABSTRACT
With the introduction of diverse variety of display transmission
and resolutions channel capacities, the Joint Video Team (JVT)
has developed the H.264/SVC as an extension of H.264/AVC. In
fact, it provides a single compressed bit-stream with several
scalability levels. Such a dataflow needs to be analyzed.
Consequently, this paper is the first that decorticates and
investigates the H264/SVC bit-stream in order to highlight its
contribution from one hand and to analyze deeply the different
sub bit-stream modules in terms of size and importance on the
other hand. Results of a first analysis shows that multicast
coding using H264/SVC standard provides an average bit rate
reduction of 18% compared to simulcast. Second analysis
demonstrates the importance of inter layer prediction. Then a
third study illustrates two best combinations for two network
bandwidth limitation. Finally, analysis of different subfields that
constitute H264/SVC bit stream shows the importance of the
residual module which can form up to 72% of the total data
output. Results also illustrate the significance of the inter-layer
prediction. In fact, base layer information takes the lion’s share
of bit consumption mainly for B frame.
General Terms
Signal processing, video compression.
Keywords
Scalable Video Coding, bit-stream, complexity, inter-layer
prediction.
1. INTRODUCTION
Currently, the real-time video transmission over the Internet is
more and more used in several applications. This heterogeneity
causes problems of bit-stream adaptation to ensure a good
quality of customer service. One solution to this problem is to
deliver the same video with different characteristics such as
resolution, video quality and frame rate. Thus, the user can
choose the video according to his needs. Despite the efficiency
of this solution, it causes numerous problems for instance:
storage, video management at server level and redundancy
packages from the video. Certainly, this redundancy is due to the
fact that two versions of the same video have several packages
in common. To overcome these problems, scalable video coding
(SVC) standard was adopted. In fact, SVC is the recent
development of the Joint Video Team (JVT) of ITU-T Video
Coding Experts Group (VCEG) and ISO/IEC Moving Pictures
Experts Group (MPEG) [1]. It can be considered as an extension
of the H.264/AVC [2, 3, 4]. It is designed to offer temporal,
quality (SNR), and spatial scalability. The resulting SVC bit
stream is scalable thus; an explicit part can be deserted to get a
sub-stream which may be decoded in order to provide an output
video sequence with reduced frame-rate or for targeted spatial
resolution or quality in terms of PSNR. In this paper, a survey of
the complexity of this standard was developed in order to
highlight the complexity source of this standard. No H264/SVC
bit stream analysis was performed in literature to emphasis the
size and the importance of the different modules that constitute
the sub-streams that insure the scalability. In fact, using the
video scalability, different versions of a single video sequence is
stored in one file. Therefore, it can serve different users with a
single stream and limits the amount of data flowing over the
network. In fact, many features or tools are introduced in order
to lead a better coding efficiency which causes a major increase
of the video encoder [5, 6]. The remainder of this paper is
structured as follows. In section II, an overview of the scalable
video coding extension is introduced in order to underline the
SVC features. Then a modular bit stream description is detailed
in section III. This is followed by SVC performance analysis in
section IV. Then, a bit stream analysis is detailed in section V.
Finally, conclusion and perspectives are presented in section VI.
2. SCALABLE VIDEO CODING
EXTENSION OVERVIEW
Application areas today, range from video telephony and video
conferencing over mobile TV to DVD, and HD DVD. For these
applications a variety of video transmission and storage systems
may be employed. Scalable video coding is considered as a
suitable solution to the problems caused by the characteristics of
modern video transmission systems. With the introduction of the
H.264/AVC video coding standard [2, 3, 4] several
amendment in video compression have been established. Then,
the scalable video coding SVC standard is recently developed by
the JVT [1, 7, 8, 9]. The term “scalability” passes on to the
removal of parts of the video bit stream in rank to adjust it to the
various needs of end users. Thus, a video bit stream is called
scalable while parts of the stream can be unconcerned in a way
that the resulting sub-stream forms an additional valid bit stream
for some target decoder. The H.264/SVC encoder is shown in
Figure 1. We may observe that video source is undergone using
a down sampling, thus the base layer encoder, Layer 0, takes a
lower resolution video sequence as input and encodes it with
ordinary H.264/AVC standard. For the enhancement layer,
Layer1, the input is in a higher resolution and be coded as an
ordinary H.264/AVC moreover interlayer predictions provide
additional coding choices such as motion vectors, intra