Classified Multifilter Up-Sampling Algorithm in Spatial Scalability for H.264/SVC Encoder

Abstract

H.264/scalable video coding (SVC) has spatial scalability which can provide various resolution sequences for a single encoded bit-stream. The various resolutions can be achieved by up-sampling a lower image resolution sequence. The up-sampling method employed in H.264/SVC is directly proportional to the video quality. In order to improve the video quality with an effective up-sampling method, we propose a classified multifilter up-sampling algorithm for H.264/SVC in spatial scalability which classifies an image region as edges and nonedges. An appropriate filter is then applied to up-sample the image. In the proposed scheme, we applied the Wiener filter for edges and conventional filter for nonedges within the defined window size to preserve the edges in the up-sampled image sequence. The experimental results show that the average peak signal-to-noise ratio improvement and bit-rate reduction are 0.5 dB and 9%, respectively, which confirm that the performance of the proposed method is better than that of the existing H.264/SVC standard.