Overview of SHVC: Scalable Extensions of the High Efficiency Video Coding Standard

Abstract

This paper provides an overview of Scalable High efficiency Video Coding (SHVC), the scalable extensions of the High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) standard, published in the second version of HEVC. In addition to the temporal scalability already provided by the first version of HEVC, SHVC further provides spatial, signal-to-noise ratio, bit depth, and color gamut scalability functionalities, as well as combinations of any of these. The SHVC architecture design enables SHVC implementations to be built using multiple repurposed single-layer HEVC codec cores, with the addition of interlayer reference picture processing modules. The general multilayer high-level syntax design common to all multilayer HEVC extensions, including SHVC, MV-HEVC, and 3D HEVC, is described. The interlayer reference picture processing modules, including texture and motion resampling and color mapping, are also described. Performance comparisons are provided for SHVC versus simulcast HEVC and versus the scalable video coding extension to H.264/advanced video coding.