Fast mode decision for spatial scalable video coding

Scalable video coding (SVC) is an on-going standard and the current working draft (WD) is an extension of H.264/AVC. It provides scalability at the bit stream level with good compression efficiency, and allowing free combinations of spatial, temporal and SNR scalability. In the WD, exhaustive search technique is employed to select the best coding mode for each macroblock. This technique achieves highest possible coding efficiency, but it results in higher computational complexity. To overcome this, we propose a novel fast mode decision scheme for spatial scalability in SVC. In this scheme, the mode distribution relationship between base layer and enhancement layers is employed to reduce the candidate mode set at enhancement layers. The experimental results show that the proposed scheme provides significant reduction in computational complexity without any noticeable coding loss