Advances in the scalable amendment of H.264/AVC

To support clients with diverse capabilities, ISO/IEC MPEG and ITU-T form a Joint Video Team (JVT) to develop a scalable video coding (SVC) technology that uses single bitstream to provide multiple spatial, temporal, and quality (SNR) resolutions, thus satisfying low-complexity and low-delay constraints. It is an amendment of the emerging standard H.264/AVC and it provides an H.264/AVC-compatible base layer and a fully scalable enhancement layer, which can be truncated and extracted on-the-fly to obtain a preferred spatio-temporal and quality resolution. An overview of the adopted key technologies in the SVC and a comparison in coding efficiency with H.264/AVC are presented.