An adaptive early termination of mode decision using inter-layer correlation in scalable video coding

The scalable video coding (SVC) standard adopts the variable size motion estimation (ME) to select the best coding mode for each macroblock (MB). Although this technique achieves the highest possible coding efficiency, it results in extremely large computation complexity which obstructs SVC from the practical application. In this paper, we propose an adaptive early termination of fast mode decision algorithm in SVC. It makes use of the coding information of spatial neighbor MBs and the corresponding MBs in base layer to early terminate the mode decision procedure. Experimental results show that the proposed fast mode decision algorithm can achieve computational saving up to 67% with no significant loss of rate distortion (RD) performance.