A network-adaptive SVC Streaming Architecture

In Video streaming environment, we must consider terminal and network characteristics, such as display resolution, frame rate, computational resource, network bandwidth, etc. The JVT (Joint Video Team) by ISO/IEC MPEG and ITU-TVCEG is currently standardizing Scalable Video Coding (SVC). This can represent video bitstreams in different sealable layers for flexible adaptation to terminal and network characteristics. This characteristic is very useful in video streaming applications. One fully scalable video can be extracted with specific target spatial resolution, temporal frame rate and quality level to match the requirements of terminals and networks. Besides, the extraction process is fast and consumes little computational resource, so it is possible to extract the partial video bitstream online to accommodate with changing network conditions etc. With all the advantages of SVC, we design and implement a network-adaptive SVC streaming system with an SVC extractor and a streamer to extract appropriate amounts of bitstreams to meet the required target bitrates and spatial resolutions. The proposed SVC extraction is designed to allow for flexible switching from layer to layer in SVC bitstreams online to cope with the change in network bandwidth. The extraction is made in every GOP unit. We present the implementation of our SVC streaming system with experimental results.