OPTIMAL PER-PIXEL ESTIMATION FOR SCALABLE VIDEO CODING

We address the problem of real-time mode decisions for enhance-ment layer coding in the context of fine granularity scalable cod-ing. While traditional mode selection strategies take into account the potential future drift stemming from coding the current frame with a particular enhancement layer coding mode, they usually fail to acknowledge the effect of past drift from previous partially re-constructed enhancement references. We introduce an optimal per-pixel drift estimation algorithm that calculates the effect of band-width variations and outages on the enhancement reference. Ex-perimental results show the algorithm’s advantages. 1