H.264 Based Scalable Video Coding

With the advent of 3G/4G cellular standards such as WCDMA, LTE, there is a tremendous demand for video transmission over wireless networks. Further, video streaming applications over wireless networks are ideally suited to reach the far flung corners of the country, which are otherwise inaccessible to the traditional wireline infrastructure. However, the highly fading nature of the wireless channel poses a significant challenge to the video streaming reliability in these networks. Ideally, a multimedia data compression standard with minimal complexity to support decoding at a variety of possible fidelities depending on the reliability of the underlying wireless channel would be highly desirable for wireless video streaming. The Scalable Video Coding (SVC) annexure of the H.264 video coding standard was precisely designed with the objective to enable transmission and unpacking at multiple spatio-temporal resolutions with variegated bitrates and is thus readily suited for video streaming in wireless networks. In this research it is also planned to demonstrate a working model of the SVC codec for video streaming of live events on the IITK campus wireless infrastructure.