On improving the Fast Mode Decision of the Enhancement Layer in Scalable Video Coding extension of H.264/AVC

Scalable video coding (SVC) is an extension of H.264/MPEG 4 AVC approved by JVT on November, 2007. The characteristic of the SVC is the encoding of a high-quality video bitstream that contains one or more enhancement layer bitstreams in addition to the base layer bitstream. We propose a fast enhancement layer macro block (MB) mode decision algorithm for spatial scalable SVC utilizing statistical characteristics of lower layer. The MB mode of spatial enhancement layer is statistically highly correlated with MB mode of lower layer. The proposed algorithm intelligently limits the possible candidate MB modes of enhancement layer to the modes predicted from the base layer for spatial scalable coding. We implemented our algorithm on JSVM codec to verify the performance of our algorithm. Using our algorithm, we can reduce the encoding time while almost maintaining PSNR and bitrate.