H.264/SVC Rate Allocation based on Graceful Degradation of Subjective Quality in Frame Rate Switching

This paper proposes a rate allocation method for Scalable Video Coding (SVC) temporal scalability based on subjective quality metric. The proposed method can gracefully lower the perceptual video quality by switching the frame rate under the situation of bandwidth fluctuation. Each temporal layer is measured by the subjective quality metric and allocated with a corresponding rate. The proposed method tends to increase the quality of low layer by sacrificing the high layer quality but human cannot perceive the degradation of high layer. Simulations show that the proposed method can efficiently allocate the rate of each temporal layer with closer subjective video quality when the bandwidth is insufficient. Compared with the JVT recommended method, the difference of subjective quality can be reduced from 4.03dB to 2.8dB.