A temporally scalable video codec and its applications to a video conferencing system with dynamic network adaption for mobiles

Abstract

In this paper we present a multipoint video conferencing system that adapts to heterogeneous members including mobiles. The system is built upon a low complexity scalable extension of our H.264 codec DAVC, and a congestion-aware dynamic adaptation layer. We show that our temporally scaled video codec DSVC has the same RD performance as the non-scaled version with comparable configuration. We achieve this by QP cascading, i.e., assigning gradually refining quantization parameters to the declining temporal layers. The different quantization of frames does not lead to visually distinguishable quality fluctuations. We also present and analyze a mobile-compliant version of DSVC at reduced complexity that still admits comparable performance. Finally, we report on early work of dynamic layer tuning. Derived of delay variation measures, senders exploit scalable video layering to adapt the video transmission to varying network conditions. Initial results indicate that video performance remains close to optimal.