Quality Estimation for H.264/SVC Inter-layer Residual Prediction in Spatial Scalability

Abstract

Scalable Video Coding (SVC) provides an efficient compression for the video bitstream equipped with various scalable configurations. H.264 scalable extension (H.264/SVC) is the most recent scalable coding standard. It involves the state-of-the-art inter-layer prediction to provide higher coding efficiency than previous standards. Moreover, the requirements for the video quality on distinct situations like link conditions or video contents are usually different. Therefore, it is very desirable to be able to construct a model so that the target quality can be estimated in advance. This work proposes a Quantization-Distortion (Q-D) model for H.264/SVC spatial scalability, and then we can estimate video quality before the actual encoding is performed. In particular, we further decompose the residual from the inter-layer residual prediction into the previous distortion and Prior-Residual so that the residual can be estimated. In simulations, based on the proposed model, we estimate the actual Q-D curves, and its average accuracy is 88.79%.