Quality analysis of scalable video coding on unstable transmissions

This paper presents a study of quality on scalable video sequences coded using the scalable extension of the H.264 standard (SVC). A group of experiments was performed to measure, primarily, the effects that transmission instability has in the quality of the videos and the relationship among three scalability methods (spatial, temporal and quality) in terms of quality. A set of experiments was performed to measure the subjective quality using the ACR-HRR methodology and recommendations from ITU-R Rec. BT.500 and ITU-T Rec. P.910. The results show that the amount of instability is not as important as just the presence of instability, that video quality can be deteriorated due to instability and that temporal scalability usually produces videos with worse quality than spatial and quality scalabilities.