This thesis presents an efficient switching method among non-scalable bit-streams in a multi-rate based video streaming system. This method not only takes advantage of the high coding efficiency of non-scalable coding schemes (comparing with scalable ones), but also allows a high flexibility in streaming services to accommodate the heterogeneity of real-world networks. One unique feature of our method is that, at every pre-selected switching point, the reconstructed frame at each rate or two reconstructed frames at different bit-rates will go through an independent or a joint processing in the wavelet domain, using an SPIHT-type coding algorithm. Another important step in our method is that we will apply a novel bit allocation strategy over all hierarchical trees that are generated afte...[ Read more ]

This thesis presents an efficient switching method among non-scalable bit-streams in a multi-rate based video streaming system. This method not only takes advantage of the high coding efficiency of non-scalable coding schemes (comparing with scalable ones), but also allows a high flexibility in streaming services to accommodate the heterogeneity of real-world networks. One unique feature of our method is that, at every pre-selected switching point, the reconstructed frame at each rate or two reconstructed frames at different bit-rates will go through an independent or a joint processing in the wavelet domain, using an SPIHT-type coding algorithm. Another important step in our method is that we will apply a novel bit allocation strategy over all hierarchical trees that are generated after the wavelet decomposition so as to achieve a significantly improved coding quality. Comparing with other existing methods, our method can achieve the seamless switching at each pre-selected switching point with a better rate-distortion performance.