Designing an HEVC Based Scalable Video Coding Extension

With the emergence of the High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) standard, significant additional video compression improvements have recently been provided, notably around 50% increased compression performance regarding the previously available standard video coding solutions. Moreover, the same requirements which demanded some years ago for a scalable extension of the H.264/AVC standard, named Scalable Video Coding (SVC) are now again demanding the development of a scalable extension of the HEVC standard, meaning that an HEVC compliant base layer should be adopted. In this context, this paper serves three main purposes: first, it reports the recent efforts towards developing a scalable video coding framework based on the HEVC standard; next, it reviews the current compression performance for quality scalability solutions against the most relevant available alternatives, notably the SVC standard quality scalable solutions and the H.264/AVC and HEVC simulcasting and single-layer solutions; finally, it discusses the possible architectural designs for the scalable HEVC extension to bring a clearer view about the advantages and disadvantages of each technical approach. Keywords—Scalable coding; HEVC; H.264/AVC; H.264/SVC; Simulcasting; Single layer coding,