Hierarchical reference picture selection method for temporal scalability beyond H.264

Temporal scalability is effective to adapt the bitstream adaptation for various capabilities of the video terminals and the delivery network, e.g. the processing speed of video terminals and the transmission rate, respectively. This technique uses the reference picture selection method on both the current layer and lower layers. The conventional scalability selects only from the last previous picture of the current layer and that of the first lower layer. This paper proposes a novel prediction scheme, the HRPS (hierarchical reference picture selection) method in which the reference picture is selected from more previous pictures in more layers, in order to improve coding efficiency, keeping the temporal scalability functionality. The proposed method is developed with a modification of the H.264. This paper demonstrates the effectiveness of the HRPS compared with the conventional temporal scalable methods.