Fast mode decision for SNR scalability in SHVC digest of technical papers

The scalable extension of the High Efficiency Video Coding standard (SHVC) combines the large compression efficiency and high visual quality of HEVC with the possibility of encoding several different versions of the same encoded video in a single bitstream. However, this comes at the cost of a high computational complexity. We propose a number of methods to reduce the encoding time of SHVC quality enhancement layers. By restricting the number of possible coding modes in the ratedistortion optimization process for each block in the enhancement layer, our techniques reduce the complexity by 84.7% on average, with a decrease in PSNR of 0.12 dB and a bit rate increase of 1%.