Adaptive Scanning Method for Fine Granularity Scalable Video Coding

One of the recent and most significant technical properties can be expressed as “digital convergence,” which is helping lead the technical paradigm into a ubiquitous environment. As an initial trial of realizing a ubiquitous environment, the convergence between broadcasting and telecommunication fields is now on the way, where it is required to develop a scalable video coding scheme for one-source and multi-use media. Traditional scalable video coding schemes have, however, limitations for higher stable picture quality especially on the region of interest. Therefore, this paper introduces an adaptive scanning method especially designed for a higher regional-stable picture quality under a ubiquitous video coding environment, which can improve the subjective quality of the decoded video by most-preferentially encoding, transmitting, and decoding the top-priority image information of the region of interest. Thus, the video can be more clearly visible to users. From various simulation results, the proposed scanning method in this paper can achieve an improved subjective picture quality far better than the widely used raster scan order in conventional video coding schemes, especially on the region of interest, and without a significant loss of quality in the left-over region.