Efficient bitstream extraction for scalable video based on simulated annealing

This paper presents an efficient method for bitstream extraction for scalable video based on simulated annealing. Following the same spirit as annealing, the proposed method searches for the optimized combination of quality layers for extraction through slowly reducing the simulated temperature according to the characteristics of frames in different temporal levels. Experimental results show that the proposed method provides an optimized performance, which is significantly higher than that of the basic extraction method. When compared with the quality layer-based extraction method in the reference software model of H.264/SVC (Joint Scalable Video Model), the proposed method can achieve a similar rate-distortion performance with a significantly reduced computational complexity. Furthermore, the proposed method can obtain a more smoothed video quality, which is always preferable by the end user.