Introduction of a zonal search strategy for SVC inter-layer prediction module

Recently SVC specification has been published as the ultimate solution to include scalable functionality (spatial, SNR and temporal) on H.264 standard. One of the most important SVC´s internal modules is the inter-layer prediction module, which is responsible for redundancies identification and removal among different scalable video layers. In order to increase inter-layer prediction module performance we propose the use of a zonal search strategy. Particularly the proposed solution is an innovative MVFAST-based algorithm, specially designed to reduce latency delay and global execution time for an SVC hardware implementation.