Region based inter-layer cross-color filtering for scalable extension of HEVC

Inter-layer filtering is a key module of the emerging Scalable Extension of High Efficiency Video Coding Standard (SHVC). In SHVC, up-sampled based layer reconstructed pictures are used as inter-layer references to predict enhancement layer frames such that inter-layer redundancy is reduced. To improve the coding performance of inter-layer filtering, luma plane based chroma plane enhancement was proposed at picture level. However, the efficiency of the picture level adaptation is not very promising when picture resolution is high. To address this issue, region based inter-layer cross-color filtering is proposed in this paper. Simulations under the common test conditions defined by Joint Collaborative Team on Video Coding (JCT-VC) showed that significant chroma coding gain and moderate luma improvement were achieved by the proposed method. When compared to the luma plane based chroma plane enhancement method, the coding gain over SHVC reference software SHM-2.0 is about doubled while the decoding complexity is kept even lower. Moreover, the proposed method outperforms other tools studied in SHVC core experiment on inter-layer filtering.