H.26L-based fine granularity scalable video coding

This paper proposes an efficient scalable coding scheme with fine-grain scalability, where the base layer is encoded with H.26L, and the enhancement layer is encoded with PFGS coding. Motion compensation with adaptive block size has greatly contributed to the coding efficiency improvement in H.26L. In order to improve efficiency of the enhancement layer coding, an improved motion estimation scheme that uses both information from the base layer and the enhancement layer is also proposed in this paper. As H.26L significantly improves the coding efficiency of the base layer compared with MPEG-4 ASP (Advanced Simple Profile) and PFGS coding is a significant improvement over MPEG-4 FGS at the enhancement layer, the proposed scheme, which is a nontrivial extension of PFGS to H.26L, can benefit from both H.26L and PFGS coding. Experiments show that the overall coding efficiency gain of the proposed scheme is about 4.0 dB compared with MPEG-4 FGS.