Scalable video coding based on motion-compensated temporal filtering: complexity and functionality analysis

Video coding techniques yielding state-of-the-art compression performance require large amount of computational resources, hence practical implementations, which target a broad market, often tend to trade-off coding efficiency and flexibility for reduced complexity. Scalable video coding instead, not only provides seamless adaptation to bit-rate variation, but also allows the end user to trim down the resources he needs to perform real-time decoding by limiting the process to a subset of the original content. Hence, by choosing the quality, frame-rate and/or resolution of the reconstructed sequence, each decoder can meet its hardware limitations without affecting the encoding process of the media provider. This paper proposes a preliminary analysis of the memory-access behavior of a fully scalable video decoder and investigates the capability of selecting the operational settings in order to adapt to the available hardware resources on the target device.