Scalable Extension of HEVC for Flexible High-Quality Digital Video Content Services

This paper describes the scalable extension of High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) to provide flexible high-quality digital video content services. The proposed scalable codec is designed on multi-loop decoding architecture to support inter-layer sample prediction and inter-layer motion parameter prediction. Inter-layer sample prediction is enabled by inserting the reconstructed picture of the reference layer (RL) into the decoded picture buffer of the enhancement layer (EL). To reduce the motion parameter redundancies between layers, the motion parameter of the RL is used as one of the candidates in merge mode and motion vector prediction in the EL. The proposed scalable extension can support scalabilities with minimum changes to the HEVC and provide average Bjontegaard delta bitrate gains of about 24% for spatial scalability and of about 21% for SNR scalability compared to simulcast coding with HEVC.