Memory analysis for H.264/AVC scalable extension encoder

In this paper, the first overall memory analysis for H.264/AVC scalable extension (SVC) is presented. Since the dependency among layers is a major discrepancy between SVC and H.264/AVC, the hardware design about them is quite different. Therefore, we analyze the memory bandwidth and memory access requirement of different coding flows for SVC. Based on the analysis results, we deduce that the frame-level method enjoys the best performance. With some improvements from previous work and proposal by our observation, the external memory access could be further reduced by at least 53% than initial design. Furthermore, through our analysis, a solution is provided for the trade-off between internal memory storage and external memory bandwidth in hardware design.