Scalable High Efficiency Video Coding : Cross-layer optimization

Abstract: In July 2014, the second version of the HEVC/H.265 video coding standard was announced, and it included the Scalable High efficiency Video Coding (SHVC) extension. SHVC is used for coding a video stream with subset streams of the same video with lower quality, and it supports spatial, temporal and SNR scalability among others. This is used to enable easy adaption of a video stream, by dropping or adding packages, to devices with different screen sizes, computing power and bandwidth. In this project SHVC has been implemented in Ericsson's research encoder C65. Some cross-layer optimizations have also been implemented and evaluated. The main goal of these optimizations are to make better decisions when choosing the reference layer's motion parameters and QP, by doing multi-pass coding and using the coded enhancement layer information from the first pass.