Scalable video streaming to heterogeneous receivers
Osama A. Lotfallah, Sethuraman Panchanathan · 2006
Abstract — Video streaming over networks, such as wireless and Internet, is a challenging problem, due to network heterogeneity and variability of the visual content. Various scalable video coding techniques have been proposed to facilitate adaptable transmission of video streams. In this paper, we compare the bandwidth utilization of such scalable schemes for video streaming to receivers of diverse capacities. The results reveal the superiority of scalable schemes that adopt bit plane coding, such as Fine Granularity Scalability (FGS) and Progressive-FGS (PFGS). In addition, we evaluate the reconstructed qualities of FGS and PFGS streams due to heterogeneity of receiver capacities and variability of the transmission channel. The results suggest that, for low bit rate receivers/channels, FGS streams can be used instead of PFGS streams, thus reducing the computational overhead at the video receiver.