Scalable extensions of HEVC for next generation services

The high efficiency video coding (HEVC) standard being developed by ITU-T VCEG and ISO/IEC MPEG achieves a compression goal of reducing the bitrate by half for the same visual quality when compared with earlier video compression standards such as H.264/AVC. It achieves this goal with the use of several new tools such as quad-tree based partitioning of data, larger block sizes, improved intra prediction, the use of sophisticated prediction of motion information, inclusion of an in-loop sample adaptive offset process etc. This paper describes an approach where the HEVC framework is extended to achieve spatial scalability using a multi-loop approach. The enhancement layer inter-predictive coding efficiency is improved by including within the decoded picture buffer multiple up-sampled versions of the decoded base layer picture. This approach has the adavantage of achieving significant coding gains with a simple extension of the base layer tools such as inter-prediction, motion information signaling etc. Coding efficiency of the enhancement layer is further improved using adapative loop filter and internal bit-depth increment. The performance of the proposed scalable video coding approach is compared to simulcast transmission of video data using high efficiency model version 6.1 (HM-6.1). The bitrate savings are measured using Bjontegaard Delta (BD) rate for a spatial scalability factor of 2 and 1.5 respectively when compared with simulcast anchors. It is observed that the proposed approach provides an average luma BD rate gains of 33.7% and 50.5% respectively.