The Scalable Video Coding (SVC) extension of the H.264/AVC (AVC) video coding standard features spatial, quality and temporal scalability. Backwards compatibility with legacy decoding devices is maintained through an H.264/AVC compliant base layer, which represents the lowest quality of an SVC bit-stream. However, it is often desirable to also provide the higher quality layers to legacy H.264/AVC devices. This is achieved by a process commonly known as “bit-stream rewriting”, which allows for an efficient SVC to AVC conversion by exploiting the similarities of the two codecs. This paper introduces an improved version of the existing JSVM reference software rewriter (JSVM-rewriter). The improvements include a better run-time performance through parallel processing, as well as applicability in streaming scenarios. A detailed evaluation provides performance measurements for the improved rewriter and compares it to the existing JSVM-rewriter. The evaluation shows that notable performance improvements can be achieved using the presented approach. The paper concludes on how the rewriter could be further improved.
[1]
Manuel P. Malumbres,et al.
Hierarchical Parallelization of an H.264/AVC Video Encoder
,
2006,
International Symposium on Parallel Computing in Electrical Engineering (PARELEC'06).
[2]
Jie Zhao,et al.
Bit stream rewriting for SVC-to-AVC conversion
,
2008,
2008 15th IEEE International Conference on Image Processing.
[3]
Heiko Schwarz,et al.
Overview of the Scalable Video Coding Extension of the H.264/AVC Standard
,
2007,
IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology.
[4]
Angelos Bilas,et al.
Real-time parallel MPEG-2 decoding in software
,
1997,
Proceedings 11th International Parallel Processing Symposium.