The Relevance of Scalability: From the MPEG-2 Standard to the Proposed Novel Paradigm of Scalable HEVC Video Coding

The emergence of new visual communication systems has posed the need of compression of a huge amount of information into a limited bit-rate datastream for transmission and storage purposes; with an acceptable quality of decoded data, ensured at the users end. The flexibility of new communication systems and the success of multimedia databases require interactive capabilities for content-based access and manipulation of audio-visual information. The thriving and ever-strengthening interweave of communication, computing, networking and entertainment services has assumed a prominent place in everyday lives of the human civilization. The paper brings forth the need of a scalable video coding extension of the upcoming HEVC video coding standard for spatial and quality scalable coding. Besides coding tools known from scalable profiles of prior video coding standards, it includes new coding tools that further improve the enhancement layer coding efficiency. This paper gives a concise overview of the MPEG-2 video compression standard, with due emphasis on the pertinent coding profile i.e. SNR scalable coding profile. The Quality measure is based on the objective video metric i.e. the peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) for the various frames of the employed video sequences. MATLAB has been used as the computational environment to analyse the implemented code for the MPEG-2 scalable video coding profile