Semantic scalability using tennis videos as examples

Abstract

With advances in broadcasting technologies, people are now able to watch videos on devices such as televisions, computers, and mobile phones. Scalable video provides video bitstreams of different size under different transmission bandwidths. In this paper, a semantic scalability scheme with four levels is proposed, and tennis videos are used as examples in experiments to test the scheme. Rather than detecting shot categories to determine suitable scaling options for Scalable Video Coding (SVC) as in previous studies, the proposed method analyzes a video, transmits video content according to semantic priority, and reintegrates the extracted contents in the receiver. The purpose of the lower bitstream size in the proposed method is to discard video content of low semantic importance instead of decreasing the video quality to reduce the video bitstream. The experimental results show that visual quality is still maintained in our method despite reducing the bitstream size. Further, in a user study, we show that evaluators identify the visual quality as more acceptable and the video information as clearer than those of SVC. Finally, we suggest that the proposed scalability scheme in the semantic domain, which provides a new dimension for scaling videos, can be extended to various video categories.