System and method for fine granular scalable video with selective quality enhancement

A video encoder comprising:

• a base layer circuit capable of receiving an input stream of video frames and gene rating therefrom compressed base layer video frames suitable for transmission to a streaming video receiver;
• an enhancement layer circuit capable of receiving said input stream of video frames and a decoded version of said compressed base layer video frames and performing bit-plane coding to generate therefrom enhancement layer video data associated with, and allocated to, corresponding ones of said compressed base layer video frames;
• and
• an adaptive quantization controller capable of receiving at least one quantization parameter from said base layer circuit and, in response thereto, determining a corresponding shifting factor for shifting at least one bit plane associated with said enhancement layer video data and modifying a data field in said enhancement layer video data to cause said video streaming receiver to assign a higher decoding priority to said shifted at least one bit plane.

For use in a video encoder comprising:

• 1) a base layer circuit capable of receiving an input stream of video frames and generating therefrom compressed base layer video frames suitable for transmission to a streaming video receiver, and 2) an enhancement layer circuit capable of receiving the input stream of video frames and a decoded version of the compressed base layer video frames and performing bit-plane coding to generate therefrom enhancement layer video data associated with, and allocated to, corresponding ones of the compressed base layer video frames, a method of modifying an allocation of the enhancement layer video data among the corresponding ones of the compressed base layer video frames, the method comprising the steps of:
• receiving at least one quantization parameter from the base layer circuit;
• determining a corresponding shifting factor for shifting at least one bit plane associated with the enhancement layer video data;
• and
• modifying a data field in the enhancement layer video data to cause the video streaming receiver to assign a higher decoding priority to the shifted at least one bit plane.