Ofer Hadar

We present an adaptive pre-processing (pre-filtering) method and system for the efficient Scalable Video Coding (SVC). Our adaptive SVC pre-filtering system enables to decrease motion activity, and in turn, enables to decrease quantization fluctuations within the background region of each layer of a SVC video sequence, which contains two or more layers. In turn, this enables to use smaller quantization parameters, but still to obtain the same compression rate for the optimal usage of encoder and decoder computational resources in order to achieve optimal video presentation quality. Our adaptive pre-filtering system is very efficient since it is based on a SVC Computational Complexity-Rate- Distortion (C-R-D) analysis, adding a complexity dimension to the conventional rate-distortion (R-D) analysis for the SVC coding. As a result, the SVC visual presentation quality at the decoder side is significantly improved even for the decoders with very limited computational resources, which can be very useful for various mobile devices, such as cellular phones. Also, we perform Region-of-Interest (ROI) SVC pre-processing for enabling providing efficient coding of the desired Region-of-Interest. The performance of the presented systems is demonstrated and compared with the Joint Scalable Video Model 9.19 (JSVM 9.19) reference software.