Probabilistic Approach for Predicting the Size of Coding Units in the Quad-Tree Structure of the Quality and Spatial Scalable HEVC

Abstract

The scalable extension of HEVC (known as SHVC), the recent scalable video coding standard, results in an improved compression performance at the cost of significant increase in computational coding complexity. One of the main factors that contribute to the SHVC encoder complexity is choosing the best partitioning structure for the coding tree units (CTUs). Our study focuses on developing a scheme for predicting the CTU structure in the quality and spatial scalable extension of HEVC. The proposed scheme uses the CTU partitioning structure of the already encoded CTUs in the enhancement layers (ELs) and base layer (BL) to predict the coding unit sizes of the to-be-encoded CTUs in the EL. Performance evaluations confirm that our proposed complexity reduction scheme significantly reduces the execution time of the SHVC encoder, while maintaining the overall quality of the coded streams.