Predictive coding of CU quadtree structure for HEVC quality scalability

Scalability in video coding is an effective functionality to serve various video contents at different levels of resolution and quality. Based on the High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) standard which achieves superior compression performance compared to the H.264/AVC, this paper proposes a new scalable coding method with a coding unit (CU) structure prediction technique for HEVC-based quality scalability. The CU structure in enhancement layer (EL) is differentially encoded using that of the basement layer (BL) as a predictor. The binary values describing the CU structure of BL are operated exclusive-OR (XOR) with those in EL at each CU depth and position. Compared to the simulcast coding, simulation without having any residual prediction technique verifies that the proposed method gains in bit-saving by 0.4% on average.