Intra-frame sharing for low-complexity decoding of SHVC video

Scalable video coding provides an efficient adaptation solution for delivering video to consumer devices with a great variety of characteristics. This technique encodes video using a base layer and several enhancement layers with different qualities. In order to reduce the total bit rate of the video stream, inter layer prediction (ILP) is enabled. However, the introduction of ILP results in a high decoding complexity since multiple layers need to be decoded at the same time. In this paper, we propose a method to reduce the decoding complexity of the scalable video stream by sharing the intra frame between layers and eliminating all other inter-layer dependencies. The experimental results show that the proposed method results in a video stream with a lower bit rate than a simulcast approach. Additionally, this approach reduces the decoder complexity compared to scalable video compression.