λ Domain based optimal bit allocation for scalable high efficiency video coding

Bit allocation is necessary for Scalable High Efficiency Video Coding (SHVC) rate control to provide optimal Rate-Distortion (R-D) performance under the bandwidth constraint. Since λ is the key factor to determine the bitrate and corresponding distortion, we seek to design a λ-domain optimal bit allocation algorithm for SHVC by taking the combined inter-layer and intra-layer dependency into consideration in this paper. We find out that the λ ratio between different pictures in the enhancement layer should be proportional to the influence of the current picture to the other enhancement layer pictures. While for the pictures in the base layer, the λ ratio should be proportional to the influence of the current picture to both the base layer and enhancement layer pictures. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed bit allocation algorithm can bring obvious performance improvement.