Adaptive Decoder Complexity Reduction for Coarse Granular Scalability

The on-going scalable video coding (SVC) standard is an extension of H.264/AVC. It enables significantly improved compression performance at the expense of greatly increased computational complexity at both the encoder and the decoder sides. This paper presents an adaptive algorithm to reduce the complexity of decoder at the encoder side for coarse granular scalability. Hence, lightweight bitstreams are generated at the encoder which requires significantly less decoding complexity. The experimental results show that the proposed scheme provides significant reduction in the complexity of decoder with acceptable coding loss and minor impact on the encoder complexity.