Decoder complexity reduction for the scalable extension of HEVC

In the current standardization process of the scalable extension to High Efficiency Video Coding (SHVC) a high level syntax multi-loop approach is close to completion. On the one hand this multi-loop approach offers a reasonable rate-distortion performance while only minimal modifications to the encoder and decoder in both layers are required. On the other hand this approach requires full reconstruction of all pictures of all layers at the decoder side which, in the case of quality scalability with two layers, doubles the decoder complexity. In this paper high layer modifications to the prediction structure similar to the scalable extension of H.264 - AVC are implemented in SHVC and studied. These modifications allow for an enhancement layer decoder implementation to skip a significant amount of motion compensation and deblocking operations in the base layer. It is shown that the decoder complexity can hereby be reduced up to 55% for the random access configuration and up to 64% for the low delay configuration compared to SHVC. An overall coding performance increase of 1.2% when decoding the enhancement layer is reported while when only decoding the base layer a drift can be observed between -0.16 dB for random access and -0.39 dB for low delay.