A practical bit stream organization algorithm for robust H.264/SVC transmission

The H.264/SVC standard, due to its desired scalable functionality and coding efficiency, provides an ideal candidate for video transmission in many scenarios such as erasure networks and networks with heterogeneous clients. In order to reduce the impact of network bandwidth fluctuation, an adaptive priority ordering (APO) algorithm for H.264/SVC bit stream organization is proposed. It arranges H.264/SVC coding layers according to their rate–distortion (R–D) tradeoff within a GOP so that transmitted video quality can be preserved in the presence of dynamic bandwidth conditions. A practical path model is developed to reduce the time and space complexity of the APO algorithm. It is shown by simulation results that the APO algorithm offers better performance than the default H.264/SVC ordering method adopted by the JSVM software and the quality layer-based ordering method proposed previously in preserving smooth video quality under the same bandwidth. The proposed algorithms could be used together with the unequal error protection (UEP) method and the joint source-channel coding scheme to combat packet loss.