Component-adaptive up-sampling for inter layer interpolation in scalable video coding

Scalable video coding (SVC) is a newly emerging standard to be finalized as an extension of H.264/AVC. The most attractive characters in SVC are the inter layer prediction techniques, such as Intra_BL mode. But in current SVC scheme, a uniform up-sampling filter (UUSF) is employed to magnify all components of an image, which will be very inefficient and result in a lot of redundant computational complexity. To overcome this, we propose an efficient component-adaptive up-sampling filter (CAUSF) for inter layer interpolation. In CAUSF, one character of human vision system is considered, and different up-sampling filters are assigned to different components. In particular, the six-tap FIR filter used in UUSF is kept and assigned for luminance component. But for chrominance components, a new four-tap FIR filter is used. Experimental results show that CAUSF maintains the performances of coded bit-rate and PSNR-Y without any noticeable loss, and provides significant reduction in computational complexity.