Flexible P-picture (FlexP) coding for the efficient fine-granular scalability (FGS)

This paper proposes a flexible P-picture (FlexP) coding technique, where P-pictures are selectively used as references for other pictures. For a given reference bit-rate, the proposed FlexP technique can improve the quality of references by both allocating more bits to the selected P-pictures and reducing the number of selected P-pictures. In case that the reference bits for each selected P-picture are fixed, the proposed technique is able to reduce the reference bit-rate by selecting fewer P-pictures as references, meanwhile limit drifting error at low bit-rates. Therefore, the proposed FlexP technique provides more flexibility on bandwidth adaptation, as well as achieves a good trade-off between high coding efficiency and low drifting error at the enhancement layer especially when the R-D rate allocation is enabled. The experimental results show that the fine-granular scalable video coding with the proposed technique can gain more than 1 .0 dB.