An overview of scalable video streaming

Significant progress in digital video processing and communication technology has enabled the dream of highquality and real-time video streaming over various networks. Compression technologies have bridged the gap between huge amount of visual data required for video streaming and limited bandwidth of communication channels. Communication networks, including wired and wireless networks, provide the platform for video streaming applications. However, video streaming is still a challenging problem due to limited network bandwidth, the presence of channel errors, and the variability in consumer terminals. In this article, we present an overview of scalable video streaming techniques that have been developed in recent years. These techniques include scalable video coding (SVC), video transcoding, and scalable video streaming methods. Copyright (c) 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.