SVC adaptation: Standard tools and supporting methods

Recently, scalable video coding (SVC) has emerged as a promising video format for applications of multimedia communication. An SVC bitstream can be easily truncated (adapted) in spatial, temporal, and SNR dimensions to meet various characteristics of terminals and connections. Though SVC allows simple and flexible truncation of a coded bitstream, there still need to be efficient means to support the adaptation in different scenarios. In this paper, we review standard tools and supporting methods for SVC adaptation. We point out the practical questions and accordingly describe potential solutions to these questions. The paper also discusses two key standard tools in detail, namely MPEG-21 AdaptationQoS and SVC priority_id.