Abstract
The scalable extension of H.264/AVC (SVC) supports video cropping or uniform-scaling to create different lower resolution video content. However, it will cause information loss, important object deformation or unable to keep important object size in the different lower resolution. Therefore, we want to combine video retargeting with spatial scalability of the H.264/SVC to make sure generating different lower resolution video content can keep essential visual regions and condensing unimportant content. In this thesis, we proposed content-aware spatial scalability for scalable video coding. First of all, we use a mosaic-guide video retargeting method to preserve the important content in the spatial base layer. Moreover, we proposed a low overhead side information coder and several non-homogeneous interlayer prediction coding tools to mitigate the bit-rate overhead in the spatial enhancement layer. The experimental results demonstrate the proposed method not only preserves subjective quality of important content in the lower resolution sequence, but also only has an average 4.17%-4.98% bit-rate overhead.