Bandwidth-Efficient Encoder Framework for H.264/AVC Scalable Extension

Scalable video coding is the state-of-art video coding stan- dard for the future streaming applications over heterogeneous networks. Although SVC is based on H.264/AVC, some new coding tools increase the its difficulty in encoder hardware design, especially in memory issues. In this paper, hierar- chical B-frame structure and fine granularity scalability are introduced and their memory bandwidth overhead are ana- lyzed. Two method, adaptive spatial-temporal hierarchical ME and scan bucket algorithm are proposed to reduced band- width overhead 55% and 88%, respectively, while these al- gorithms have almost no quality degradation. The concept of proposed encoder framework can be further applied in high definition SVC encoder designs.