Fast mode decision for coarse grain SNR scalable video coding

Scalable Video Coding (SVC) is an on-going standard and the current working draft (WD) is an extension of H.264/AVC. In the WD, exhaustive search technique is employed to select the best coding mode for each macroblock (MB). This technique achieves highest possible coding efficiency, but it results in higher computational complexity. To overcome this, we propose a novel fast mode decision scheme for coarse grain SNR scalability (CGS) in SVC. In this scheme, the mode distribution relationships between the base layer and enhancement layers are employed to reduce the candidate mode set at enhancement layers. The experimental results show that the proposed scheme provides significant reduction in computational complexity with negligible coding loss.