Ofer Hadar

We present a novel efficient complexity-aware adaptive bitrate control with dynamic Region-of-Interest 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 and a number of filters for the dynamic pre-processing of a transition region between the ROI and background, thereby enabling to dynamically adjust the desired SVC settings. Our adaptive bit-rate control is based on an SVC computational complexity-rate-distortion (C-R-D) analysis, thereby adding a complexity dimension to the conventional Region-of-Interest SVC rate-distortion 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 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 both in quality and bit-rate.