Frame-based bit allocation for spatial scalability in H.264/SVC

The spatial scalability of H.264/SVC is achieved by a multi-layer approach, where an enhancement layer is dependent on its preceding layers. To address this dependent issue, we propose a model-based spatial layer bit allocation algorithm for H.264/SVC in this work. The inter-layer dependency is decoupled by analyzing the signal flow in the H.264/SVC encoder. We show that the rate and the distortion (R-D) characteristics of a dependent layer with a frame as a basic coding unit. Finally, a low complexity spatial layer bit allocation scheme is developed using the proposed frame-based R-D models. It is shown by experimental results that our proposed bit allocation algorithm can achieve the coding performance close to the optimal R-D performance of full search and is highly improved from current reference codec JSVM.