Adaptive bit-rate control for region-of-interest scalable video coding

In this work, we present a novel approach for providing an adaptive bit-rate control for the Region-of-Interest (ROI) Scalable Video Coding (SVC). Recently, much of the attention in the field of video adaptation has been directed to the SVC, which is the extension of the H.264/AVC standard. The need for the scalability mainly arises from the need for spatial formats, bit rates or power. To fulfill these requirements, it would be beneficial to simultaneously transmit or store video in variety of spatial/temporal resolutions and qualities, leading to the video bit-stream scalability. The ROI coding is a desirable feature in future SVC applications. For those SVC applications, users at the decoder side usually wish to receive a high-quality decoded video stream, containing the desired ROI, which should be adaptively selected from the pre-encoded scalable bit-stream. By implementing the proposed adaptive bit-rate control for the ROI SVC, smaller quantization parameters can be used, while obtaining the same compression rate, especially, in order to optimally employ the decoder computational resources and in order to achieve optimal video presentation quality. As a result, the SVC visual presentation quality at the decoder side will be significantly improved even for the decoders with very limited computational resources, which can be very useful for various mobile devices, such as cellular phones. Further, the proposed adaptive bit-rate control scheme is especially useful for future Internet and 4G applications with limited computational resources and/or with a limited channel bandwidth, such as video conferencing (between two or more mobile device users), video transrating, video transcoding between video coding standards, and many other applications.