Improvement of H.264 SVC by model-based adaptive resolution upconversion

H.264 SVC extension, as the state of art scalable video coding standard, can offer a single code stream to serve diverse communication bandwidths and display resolutions. However, the rate-distortion performance of H.264 SVC is still inferior to the non-scalable H.264 AVC. To reduce the performance gap between H.264 SVC and H.264 AVC, we propose a model-based adaptive resolution upconversion algorithm to improve the precision of the H.264 SVC inter-layer prediction. The new algorithm treats the up-sampling of video frames as an inverse problem of initial H.264 SVC down-sampling operation, and it significantly improves the performance of current H.264 SVC by optimally reversing the down-sampling filter.