Fast temporal prediction selection for H.264/AVC scalable video coding

In this paper, we propose a fast algorithm that selects the temporal prediction type for the dyadic hierarchical prediction structure in scalable video coding (SVC). We make use of the strong correlations in the large block partitions to eliminate the unnecessary computations for bi-directional prediction. Moreover, based upon the information of an 8 × 8 partition, either forward or backward prediction is skipped for its smaller block partitions. Comparing to the JSVM 9.11, our method saves the encoding time from 50% to 60% for a number of test videos over a typical range of coding bit-rates and its coding penalty is negligible.