Effective complexity control by inter-layer motion analysis for spatial scalability video coding

Scalable video coding incorporated with computation-aware concept is an interesting issue in video coding due to its ability to achieve quality as well as computation scalable. This paper presents a computation-aware algorithm for scalable video coding with spatial scalability to aim at best trade-off between rate distortion performance and computational consumption. We first observe and analyze the motion vector difference relationship between scalable base and enhancement layers to find out whether the motion vector difference of the base layer can be used for showing some information about the motion behavior of the enhancement layer. Afterwards, a linear model is proposed to establish the motion vector difference relationship between base and enhancement layers. By using the modeling results, a linear algorithm for computation distribution is thus proposed to allocate the computation of the search process for each macroblock in the enhancement layer. In addition, the rate distortion costs of the base layer are also taken into account for the computation allocation process to further improve the coding performance. Simulation results demonstrate that our proposed computation-aware algorithm not only achieves better rate distortion performance than other works under the same computational constraints but also achieves less computation necessities.