Flexible P-picture (FLEXP) coding for the efficient fine granular scalability (FGS)

  • Roger Zhou ,
  • Xiaoyan Sun ,
  • Feng Wu ,
  • Hong Bao ,
  • Shipeng Li

Published by Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc.

Publication

This paper proposes a flexible P-picture (FlexP) coding technique, where P-pictures are selectively used as references for other pictures. For a given reference bit-rate, the proposed FlexP technique can improve the quality of references by both allocating more bits to the selected Ppictures and reducing the number of non-selected Ppictures. In case that the reference bits for each selected Ppicture are fixed, the proposed technique is able to reduce the reference bit-rate by selecting fewer P-pictures as references, meanwhile limit drifting error at low bit-rates. Therefore, the proposed FlexP technique provides more flexibility on bandwidth adaptation, as well as achieves a good trade-off between high coding efficiency and low drifting error at the enhancement layer especially when the R-D rate allocation is enabled. The experimental results show that the fine-granular scalable video coding with the proposed technique can gain more than 1.0dB.