Adaptive motion-compensation fine-granular-scalability (AMC-FGS) for wireless video

Transmission of video over wireless and mobile networks requires a scalable solution that is capable of adapting to the varying channel conditions in real-time (bit-rate scalability). Furthermore, video content needs to be coded in a scalable fashion to match the capabilities of a variety of devices (complexity scalability). These two properties—bit rate and complexity scalability—provide the flexibility that is necessary to satisfy the “Anywhere, Anytime, and Anyone” network paradigm of wireless systems. Meanwhile, MPEG-4 fine-granular-scalability (FGS) has been introduced as a flexible low-complexity solution for video streaming over heterogeneous networks (e.g., the Internet and wireless networks). FGS is also highly resilient to packet losses. However, the flexibility and packet-loss resilience associated with the FGS framework come at the expense of decreased coding efficiency compared with nonscalable coding. In this paper, a novel scalable video-coding framework and corresponding compression methods for wireless video streaming is introduced. Building on the FGS approach, the proposed framework, which we refer to as adaptive motion-compensation FGS (AMC-FGS), provides improved video quality of up to 2 dB. Furthermore, the new scalability structures provide the FGS framework with the flexibility to provide tradeoffs between resilience, higher coding efficiency and terminal complexity for more efficient wireless transmission.