Jens-Rainer Ohm, RWTH Aachen University, Germany and Thomas Wiegand, Fraunhofer HHI, Germany
The emerging Scalable Video Coding (SVC) standard, recently approved as an extension of H.264/AVC, provides efficient scalable representation of video allowing flexible multi-dimensional resolution adaptation. The interplay between transmission/storage and compression technology is highly simplified by this scalable video representation, giving support to various network and terminal capabilities and also giving significantly increased error robustness by very simple stream truncation. Unlike previous solutions, SVC provides a high degree of flexibility in terms of scalability dimensions (supporting various temporal/spatial resolutions, SNR/fidelity levels and global/local ROI access), while the penalty in compression performance is quite acceptable compared to single-layer coding.
The purpose of this tutorial is to give a profound insight into this emerging new technology trend, and in particular point to further directions of improvements. It will consist of a technical review of the standard, give an analysis of theoretical gains and penalties of SVC, and provide hints towards optimization of encoding and stream tailoring for specific network environment situations.
Jens-Rainer Ohm received the Dipl.-Ing. degree in 1985, the Dr.-Ing. degree in 1990, and the habil. degree in 1997, all from Technical University of Berlin (TUB), Germany. From 1985 to 1990, he was a research and teaching assistant with the Institute of Telecommunications at TUB. From 1990 to 1995, he performed work within research projects on image and video coding at the same location. Between 1992 and 2000, he has also served as lecturer on topics of digital image processing, coding and transmission at TUB.
From 1996 to 2000, he was project manager/coordinator at the Image Processing Department of Heinrich Hertz Institute (HHI) in Berlin. He was involved in research projects on motion-compensated, stereoscopic and 3-D image processing, image/video coding and content description for image/video database retrieval. Since 1998, he participates in the work of the Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG), where he has been active in the development of MPEG Video and MPEG-7 Visual standards.
In 2000, he was appointed full professor and since then holds the chair position of the Institute of Communication Engineering at RWTH Aachen University, Germany. His present research and teaching activities are in the areas of multimedia communication, multimedia signal processing/coding and services for mobile networks, with emphasis on video signals, further including fundamental topics of digital communication systems, audio signal processing and recognition and intelligent multimedia analysis.
He has served as a chair of the MPEG Video Subgroup from May 2002 to January 2005; and since then, he is one of the co-chairs of the group and of the Joint Video Team (JVT), sharing positions with Gary Sullivan.
Prof. Ohm has authored textbooks on multimedia signal processing, analysis and coding, on communications engineering and signal transmission, as well as numerous papers in the various fields mentioned above. He is member of various German and international scientific communities, and has served on the technical boards of numerous conferences.
Thomas Wiegand is the head of the Image Communication Group in the Image Processing Department of the Fraunhofer Institute for Telecommunications - Heinrich Hertz Institute Berlin, Germany. He received the Dipl.-Ing. degree in Electrical Engineering from the Technical University of Hamburg-Harburg, Germany, in 1995 and the Dr.-Ing. degree from the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany, in 2000. His research interests include video processing and coding, multimedia transmission, semantic image representation, as well as computer vision and graphics.
From 1993 to 1994, he was a Visiting Researcher at Kobe University, Japan. In 1995, he was a Visiting Scholar at the University of California at Santa Barbara, USA. From 1997 to 1998, he was a Visiting Researcher at Stanford University, USA and served as a consultant to 8x8, Inc., Santa Clara, CA, USA. He is currently a member of the technical advisory boards of the two start-up companies Layered Media, Inc., Rochelle Park, NJ, USA and Stream Processors, Inc., Sunnyvale, CA, USA.
Since 1995, he is an active participant in standardization for multimedia with successful submissions to ITU-T VCEG, ISO/IEC MPEG, 3GPP, DVB, and IETF. In October 2000, he was appointed as the Associated Rapporteur of ITU-T VCEG. In December 2001, he was appointed as the Associated Rapporteur / Co-Chair of the JVT. In February 2002, he was appointed as the Editor of the H.264/AVC video coding standard and its extensions (FRExt and SVC). In January 2005, he was appointed as Associated Chair of MPEG Video.
In 1998, he received the SPIE VCIP Best Student Paper Award. In 2004, he received the Fraunhofer Award for outstanding scientific achievements in solving application related problems and the ITG Award of the German Society for Information Technology. Since January 2006, he is an Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology.