Dynamically adjustable and scalable ROI video coding

Abstract

Regions-of-interest (ROI) coding is a desirable feature in future applications of Scalable Video Coding (SVC), which is the extension of the H.264/AVC standard. For those SVC applications, users at the decoder side usually wish to receive a high-quality decoded video stream, containing the desired ROI, which should be adaptively selected from the pre-encoded scalable bit-stream. In this work, we present a novel improved dynamically adjustable and scalable ROI video coding scheme, enabling to adaptively set desirable ROI location, size, resolution and bit-rate, according to the network bandwidth and predefined settings. This, in turn, will enable providing an effective rate control for multiple ROIs, thereby enabling adaptively selecting the required ROI from multiple ROIs in the scalable bit-stream, and adaptively changing ROI spatial resolution, ROI visual quality or amount of bits allocated for each ROI, according to the bandwidth and user's settings (i.e., according to the user's display resolution, etc.).