Performance analysis of the scalable video coding (SVC) extension of H.264/AVC for constrained scenarios

Scalable Video Coding (SVC) is the extension of H.264/AVC standard proposed by Joint Video Team (JVT) to provide flexibility and adaptability on video transmission. SVC is an extension of the H.264/AVC codec that exploits the use of layers, what permits to obtain a bit stream where specific parts can be removed to obtain an output video with a lower resolution (temporal or spatial) and/or lower quality/fidelity. This paper provides a performance analysis of the scalable video coding (SVC) extension of H.264/AVC for constrained scenarios. For this, the open-source decoder called "Open SVC Decoder" was adapted to obtain a version likely to be implemented in reconfigurable architectures. For each scenario a set of different sequences were decoded to analyze the performance of each functional block inside the decoder. From this analysis we conclude that reconfigurable architectures are a suitable solution for an SVC decoder in a constrained device or for a specific range of scalability levels. Our proposal consists in architecture of a SVC decoder that admits different options depending on device requirements where certain blocks are customizable to improve the performance of decoder in hardware resources usage and execution time.