Performance comparison of MCTF-type codecs and hybrid DCT-based codecs

A conventional video-coding system codes a video sequence at a desired fixed bit rate that is adequate for a given application. Serving different clients requires transcoding of a given sequence. Scalable coding provides straightforward solution for video coding that can serve broad range of applications without the need for transcoding. Current international video-coding standards do not provide fully scalable methods. H.264/Advanced Video Coding (AVC) is the latest video-coding standard and provides the best rate-distortion performance. Motion Compensated Embedded Zero Block Context (MC-EZBC) coder is a Motion Compensated Temporal Filtering (MCTF) type video codec that is fully scalable and provides rate-distortion performance that is comparable to that of MPEG-4 Fine Granular Scalability. The objective of this thesis is to compare the performance of the MC-EZBC codec with that of the H.264/AVC video codec. It is observed that H.264/AVC performs better than the MC-EZBC codec for most cases, but like in other cases, the introduction of scalability may severely degrade the performance of H.264/AVC.