Real-time error concealing bitstream adaptation methods for SVC in IPTV systems

Abstract

The current heterogeneity in networks and devices demands for a high degree of flexibility in IPTV systems for digital television. A scalable video coding scheme (in this paper we focus on H.264/AVC’s scalable video coding extension SVC) accommodates this flexibility from the coding point of view. Because the IP-based network delivery chain in IPTV systems may suffer from packet loss (having a severe impact on the visual quality) it is necessary to provide means for error concealment. In this paper we propose a novel method that performs adaptation on impaired SVC bitstreams so that the resulting adapted bitstream is compliant to the SVC specification and that the reconstruction result at the decoder is equivalent compared to the approach where the error concealment is implemented in the decoder itself. The adapted bitstreams have a significantly higher visual quality while our approach does not require any modification to existing SVC-compliant decoders. The results of several experiments show that the proposed method is extremely fast (over 900 frames/s) and that it introduces a negligible overhead in terms of bit rate (ca. 0.02%).