Description-Based Substitution Methods for Emulating Temporal Scalability in State-of-the-Art Video Coding Formats

Abstract MPEG-21 BSDL provides a solution for discovering the structure of a binary media resource to generate its XML description, and for the generation of an adapted media resource using a transformed description. So far, most literature related to XML-driven video content adaptation deals with the exploitation of temporal scalability by dropping certain pictures. This paper takes it a step further by focusing on how description-driven exploitation of temporal scalability can be realized by replacing coded pictures by placeholder pictures. Such an approach allows for a transparent integration with the systems layer in modern multimedia architectures. Our XML-based replacement technique will be discussed from a high-level point of view for MPEG-{1, 2} Video, MPEG-4 Visual, and SMPTE’s Video Codec 1 (VC-1). A more detailed analysis, including some performance measurements, will be provided for H.264/MPEG-4 AVC as its technical design is the most challenging one.