A fast mode selection scheme in inter-layer prediction of H.264 Scalable Extension coding

We propose a fast inter-layer mode decision method by utilizing coding information of base layer upward its enhancement layer in scalable video coding (SVC), also called MPEG-4 part 10 Advanced Video Coding Amendment 3 or H.264 Scalable Extension (SE). In this paper, when the motion vectors from the base layer have zero motion (0, 0) in inter-layer motion prediction or the Integer Transform coefficients of the residual between current MB and the motion compensated MB by the predicted motion vectors from the base layer are all zero, the block mode of the corresponding block to be encoded in the enhancement layer is determined to be the 16x16 mode. In addition, if the predicted mode of the MB to be encoded at the enhancement layer is not equal to the 16x16 mode, then the rate-distortion optimization is only performed on the reduced numbers of candidate modes which are same or smaller partitioned modes. Our proposed method exhibits the complexity reduction in encoding time up to 70% Nevertheless, it shows negligible PSNR degradation and bit rate increase up to 0.21 dB and 0.71%, respectively.