Study On The Scalable Video Coding Based On H.264/AVC Standard And Its Related Technologies

H.264/AVC is a new video codec standard accepted by ITU-T and ISO, which adopts many advanced technologies and develops them in video codec since recent years, and becomes famous for its higher coding efficiency and better network friendship than others. Based on the motion-compensated hybrid coding scheme originated from previous video codec standards, H.264/AVC has other important differences as follows: the enhanced motion prediction capability; accurate matching for small block-size transforming; adaptive in-loop deblocking filter; enhanced entropy coding. The experimental results are shown that these new characteristics promote the encoder efficiency by about 50% than the previous counterparts, but the complexity addition is inevitable. This thesis focuses all our attentions on some applications studies throughout the transport layer in the IP networks.With the increasingly extensive applications for the new emerging video coding standard, H.264/AVC, it becomes more and more important that we transport H.264/AVC video stream over MPEG-2 system by exploiting all the existing large amount of the infrastructure of MPEG-2 systems. We propose a solution for it. The key technologies are as follows: Firstly we use an H.264/AVC video as an elementary stream of MPEG-2 system, then extend the Transport stream-System Target Decoder(T-STD) of MPEG-2 standard, so as to pack the H.264/AVC video elementary stream into MPEG-2 Transport Stream(TS) to transport through Internet and decode it in the client. The decoded elementary stream should ordinarily come from a container, such as AVI or TS. We extract the H.264/AVC video from this container to be real-time decoded and be represented in the client after the reception. The experiment results show that we get a good effect, with less than 5% frames whose PSNR<40dB even in the case of bandwidth-constrained scenario. Running in the IP networks, the streaming solution can also be used for mobile video.After the algorithms optimization and multi-media instruction-set optimization for the H.264 encoder, the FGS (Fine-Granular Scalability) based on bit-plane coding is extended to realize a real-time SNR fine-granular scalable coding based on PC platform, and the frame rate can be 30 fps and over for the video with CIF format. Moreover, to enable transmission of H.264/AVC bit-stream over IP and wireless heterogeneous networks with randomly variable bandwidths, another scheme of hybrid spatial/temporal/SNR refined scalability and its rate control strategy are given: the rate control for GOP (Group of Pictures) level is done on the base-layer at the encoder side to select the QP (Quantization Parameter) according to the RDO (Rate Distortion Optimization) results, and the progressively refined rate control is done on the enhancement-layer. In comparison with the method of JM8.6+FGS (i.e., the base-layer rate control is based on JM8.6, and the enhancement-layer control is...