Efficient hierarchical inter picture coding for H.264/AVC baseline profile

Bi-predictive (B) slices are not supported in the baseline profile of the advanced video coding (H.264/AVC) standard, which results in a decreased coding efficiency compared with other profiles supporting B slices. However, many application standards, such as the mobile multimedia services specified by the Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP), use only the baseline profile for H.264/AVC. Therefore, it is worth investigating H.264/AVC coding when only intra (I) and inter (P) slices are supported. In this paper, a content-adaptive quantization parameter (QP) cascading scheme for the hierarchical P coding method compatible with baseline profile of H.264/AVC is proposed. The proposed method is based on a picture-level QP optimization. The proposed method has a significantly better rate-distortion performance than the traditional IPPP coding structure and outperforms hierarchical P coding methods using fixed delta QP settings between temporal levels noticeably with up to 0.53 dB gain in average luminance peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR).