Adaptive complexity-aware bit-rate control with region-of-interest pre-processing for Scalable Video Coding

We present an adaptive complexity-aware bit-rate control scheme with an efficient Region-of-Interest (ROI) pre-processing (pre-filtering) for the Scalable Video Coding (SVC), which is an extension of H.264/AVC. According to the proposed approach, we adaptively vary various parameters of the SVC pre-filters, such as standard deviations, thereby enabling to dynamically adjust the desired SVC settings. In addition, our adaptive pre-filtering system is based on an SVC computational complexity-rate-distortion (C-R-D) model/analysis, thereby adding a complexity dimension to the conventional Region-of-Interest SVC R-D analysis. As a result, the ROI SVC visual presentation quality is significantly improved, which can be especially useful for various resource-limited devices, such as mobile devices. The performance of the presented adaptive spatial ROI SVC pre-processing scheme is evaluated and tested in detail, further comparing it to the Joint Scalable Video Model reference software (JSVM 9.19) and demonstrating significant improvements.