Content-adaptive upsampling for scalable video coding

In the developing scalable extension of the HEVC/H.265 standard, a low-resolution baselayer picture may be used for predicting a higher resolution enhancement layer. This requires an upsampling process to generate the prediction, and this upsampling process is traditionally a linear and time invariant interpolator. In this paper, we consider an upsampling design that is both non-linear and content adaptive. This choice is motivated by the compression noise in the baselayer. We propose a novel approach to include content-aware filtering into the upsampling process. It has low complexity. More importantly, it has low latency and uses the same number of line buffers as a linear interpolator. Results show the efficacy of the method. Specifically, using the test model for the scalable extension of HEVC/H.265, we observe an average bit-rate reduction of 1.1%, when the change in resolution between layers is a factor of two in each dimension.