Multiplier Selection for Rate - Distortion Optimization in SVC

The Lagrange multiplier based rate-distortion optimization (RDO) has been widely employed in single layer video coding. During the development of scalable video coding (SVC) extension of H.264/AVC, it was directly applied in a multi-layer scenario. However, such an application is not very efficient since the correlation between layers is not considered in the Lagrange multiplier selection. To improve the overall performance, in this contribution a new selection algorithm is presented for RDO in SVC. Simulations show that the proposed method outperforms the most recent SVC reference software (JSVM 9.15). With small computational cost, average gains of 0.22 dB and 0.35 dB were reportedly achieved in the tests of four-layer quality scalability and three-layer spatial scalability, respectively.