Fast mode decision for H.264/AVC SE with combined scalability

Scalable video coding (SVC) is an H.264/AVC scalable extension (SE) that is used to provide network-friendly scalability at the bit stream level. SVC newly adapts the various prediction techniques. They can achieve high encoding efficiency, but they increase the computational complexity. In this paper, an efficient mode decision is proposed to speed up SVC with combined scalability. The experimental results show that the proposed algorithm achieves up to 54.72% speed-up factor in encoding time with a negligible loss of visual quality.