A new approach to motion compensation in spatially scalable video coding - art. no. 60770L

This paper describes a new approach for improving the coding efficiency of spatially scalable video coding. For spatial scalability implemented within the traditional hybrid block transform motion-compensated video coding framework, it has been surprisingly difficult to achieve coding efficiency significantly better than simulcast. One of the most difficult tasks to do efficiently is the motion compensation in the enhancement layer. The new approach for motion compensation presented here uses techniques borrowed from frequency scalability. The three frequency scalability approaches to motion compensation that can be adapted to spatial scalability are the pyramid scheme, the subband scheme, and the conditional replacement scheme. This paper describes the pyramid scheme and presents experimental results comparing the pyramid approach to non-scalable H.264 and simulcast.