A hybrid spatial-temporal fine granular scalable coding for adaptive QoS Internet video

In a ubiquitous multimedia space, a video streaming service is requested to be continuous and uninterrupted even if a client may change her/his client device, network link and preferences at any time and anywhere. Thus, a video coder that can provide more wide range quality-of-service (QoS) and more flexible control is urgently required. This paper presents a hybrid coder structure that integrates spatial-, temporal- and SNR-scalabilities to handle MPEG-4 videos. Using the proposed hybrid coder, different presentation qualities, including spatial-temporal resolution and SNR quality, can be rendered when frames are decoded from the base-layer (BL) and partial enhancement-layer (EL) sub-bitstreams. Besides, a refined rate-adaptation approach in the MPEG-4 FGS scheme and a buffer control mechanism are also devised to increase the bandwidth utilization and to prevent buffer instability. According to the experiments results, the proposed hybrid coder shows outperformances over classic non-scalable MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 FGS coder in consideration of the flexible QoS for Internet video streaming.