Content- adaptive scaling option selection in scalable video coding

Scalable video coders provide different options, such as temporal, spatial and SNR scalability, each option results in different kinds and levels of visual distortion depending on the content. We observe that a single scalability option does not fit the whole video content well, and the scalability operator should be varied for different temporal segments depending on the content of the segment. We propose a method to choose the best scaling option that results in minimum visual distortion. We employ four component metrics to quantify artifacts caused by bitrate reduction, spatial size reduction and temporal subsampling, which are a flatness measure, a blockiness measure, a blurriness measure, and a jerkiness measure. We define the best scaling operator as the one with the minimum distortion score which is given by a linear combination of these four component measures. Two subjective tests have been performed to validate the proposed procedure for optimal selection of scalability operators for soccer videos.