H.264/avc Fine Grain Scalability Using Bitplane Coding

The H.264/AVC standard represents an important step in the evolution of video coding standards since it offers a significant improvement in terms of rate-distortion efficiency by providing more than a factor of two in bit-rate savings against the popular MPEG-2 Video standard. In this work, a new video coding scheme which combines the fine grain scalability properties of the MPEG-4 FGS standard and the recent advances in the area of nonscalable video coding represented by the H.264/AVC standard is presented and evaluated. This new video coding scheme, called AVC-FGS, uses a H.264/AVC conformant base layer; in the enhancement layer the tools of the base layer are reused as much as possible in order to share a maximum number of tools between layers and to benefit from the H.264/AVC encoding tools properties, e.g. high coding efficiency, low complexity integer transforms.