A low complexity prioritized bit-plane coding for SNR scalability in MPEG-21 scalable video coding

In this paper, we propose a low complexity prioritized bit-plane coding scheme to improve the rate-distortion performance of cyclical block coding in MPEG-21 scalable video coding. Specifically, we use a block priority assignment algorithm to firstly transmit the symbols and the blocks with potentially better rate-distortion performance. Different blocks are allowed to be coded unequally in a coding cycle. To avoid transmitting priority overhead, the encoder and the decoder refer to the same context to assign priority. Furthermore, to reduce the complexity, the priority assignment is done by a look-up-table and the coding of each block is controlled by a simple threshold comparison mechanism. Experimental results show that our prioritized bit-plane coding scheme can offer up to 0.5dB PSNR improvement over the cyclical block coding described in the joint scalable verification model (JSVM).