Inter-layer motion field mapping for the scalable extension of HEVC

The next generation video coding standard, High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC), is under development by the Joint Collaborative Team on Video Coding (JCT-VC) of the ITU-T VCEG and the ISO/IEC MPEG. As the first version of single-layer HEVC standard comes close to completion, there is a great interest to extend the standard with scalable capabilities. In this paper, an inter-layer Motion Field Mapping (MFM) algorithm is proposed for the scalable extension of HEVC to generate the motion field of inter-layer reference pictures, such that the correlation between the motion vectors (MVs) of base-layer and enhancement-layer can be exploited. Moreover, as the proposed method does not change any block-level operation, the existing single-layer encoder and decoder logic of HEVC can be directly applied without modification of motion vector prediction for the enhancement-layer. The experimental results show the effectiveness of the proposed MFM method in improving the performance of enhancement-layer motion prediction in scalable HEVC.