Designing an HEVC Based Scalable Video Coding Extension

With the emergence of the High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) standard, significant additional video compression improvements have recently been provide, notably around 50% increased compression performance regard ing the previously available standard video coding solution s. Moreover, the same requirements which demanded some years ago for a scalable extension of the H.264/AVC standard, named Scalable Video Coding (SVC) are now again demanding the deve lopment of a scalable extension of the HEVC standard, meani ng that an HEVC compliant base layer should be adopted. In thi s context, this paper serves three main purposes: first, it re ports the recent efforts towards developing a scalable video coding framework based on the HEVC standard; next, it reviews the cu rrent compression performance for quality scalability sol utions against the most relevant available alternatives, notably t he SVC standard quality scalable solutions and the H.264/A VC and HEVC simulcasting and single-layer solutions; final ly, it discusses the possible architectural designs for th e scalable HEVC extension to bring a clearer view about the ad vantages and disadvantages of each technical approach. Keywords—Scalable coding; HEVC; H.264/AVC; H.264/SVC; Simulcasting; Single layer coding,