Optimized temporal scalability for H.264 based codecs and its applications to video conferencing

Abstract

In this paper, we describe and analyze a low complexity scalable video codec that extends our H.264-implementation DAVC. We can show that DSVC, our temporally scaled codec, attains an RD performance identical to the non-scaled version at comparable configuration. We achieve this by QP cascading, a method of assigning gradual refining quantization parameters to the declining temporal layers. The different quantization of frames does not lead to visual distinguishable quality fluctuations. This video codec is the core component of a software-based multipoint videoconference system, which works without MCU on a hybrid P2P network structure.