Early depth determination algorithm for enhancement layer intra coding of SHVC

In this paper, an improved low complexity algorithm for the scalable extension of the HEVC (SHVC) is proposed by using the information of rate-distortion cost (RD cost) of the coding unit at the co-located position in the base layer and the neighboring coding unit in the enhancement layer. The proposed algorithm in our previous work used an early determination of the depth decision by adaptively selecting an optimal threshold value on the basis of RD cost. However, the threshold value become a low accuracy value because RD cost and the coding unit depth in different resolutions depend on the quantization parameter. Therefore, the relationship of the quantization parameter in different resolutions is evaluated. Based on the evaluation results, an improved algorithm focused on the complexity reduction of the enhancement layer is proposed. The proposed algorithm is evaluated by the reference software of SHVC(SHM6.0). The simulation results show that the proposed algorithm can achieve over 48% computation complexity reduction comparing to the original SHVC algorithm.