Efficient SKIP Mode Detection for Coarse Grain Quality Scalable Video Coding

Scalable video coding (SVC) was recently standardized by the Joint Video Team as an extension of H.264. In SVC, a computationally expensive exhaustive mode decision is employed to select the best coding mode for each macroblock (MB), which achieves a high coding efficiency. In order to reduce computational complexity, we propose an efficient SKIP mode detection approach for coarse grain quality SVC. It makes use of the coding information of spatial neighboring MBs and the co-located MB in base layer to predict the SKIP mode MB and early terminate its mode decision procedure. Experimental results show that the proposed early SKIP mode decision approach can achieve the average computational saving about 54% with almost no loss of rate distortion (RD) performance in the enhancement layer.