Enhancement layer rate control for high bitrate SNR scalable video coding

Signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) scalability has been incorporated into the MPEG-2 video-coding standard to allow for the delivery of two services with the same spatial and temporal resolution but different levels of quality. Scalable video coding has many advantages, such as its capability of coping with bandwidth variations, high flexibility and so on. However, few accurate rate control schemes for enhancement layer coding have been proposed. In this paper, we will present a novel enhancement layer rate control scheme for MPEG-2 SNR scalable video coding. First, we will address the current necessity and problem of rate control for layered coding. Then through analyzing characteristics of compressed data in the enhancement layer, we will derive our rate control model. The proposed rate control model is applied to a driftfree SNR scalable encoder and we show that it performs well for coding of the enhancementlayer bitstream. 2004 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.