The High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) standard enables meeting new video quality demands such as Ultra High Definition (UHD). Its scalable extension (SHVC) allows encoding simultaneously different versions of a video, organised in layers. Thanks to inter-layer predictions, SHVC provides bit-rate savings over an equivalent HEVC simulcast encoding. Therefore, SHVC seems a promising solution for both broadcast and storage purposes. This paper proposes a multi-layer architecture of a pipeline of software HEVC encoder to perform real-time UHD spatially-scalable SHVC encoding. Inter-layer predictions are furthermore implemented to provide bit-rate savings with a minimum impact on complexity. The proposed architecture provides a good trade-off between coding gains and coding speed achieving real-time performance for 1080p60 and 1600p30 sequences in 2× spatial scalability. Moreover, experimental results show more than a 1000× speed-up compared to the SHVC reference software (SHM) and an introduced delay only reaching 14% of the equivalent HEVC coding speed.
['Ronan Parois', 'Wassim Hamidouche', 'Elie Gabriel Mora', 'Mickaël Raulet', 'Olivier Deforges']
Real-time UHD scalable multi-layer HEVC encoder architecture