An efficient mode pre-selection algorithm for H.264/AVC scalable video extension fractional motion estimation

H.264/AVC scalable video extension (SVC) adopts various advanced prediction modes to exploit the data redundancies between layers for better coding efficiency but at the cost of significantly increased computational complexity, especially for hardware realization of fractional motion estimation. This paper proposes an efficient and hardware friendly mode pre-selection algorithm which only preserves the possible prediction modes for fractional motion estimation through the pre-selection rules proposed in this paper. Simulation results demonstrate that our proposed algorithm can reduce up to 72.92% prediction modes with only 1.24% bitrate increase and 0.02dB PSNR degradation.