Bidirectional scalable motion for scalable video coding.

Motion information scalability is an important requirement for a fully scalable video codec, especially in low bit rate or small resolution decoding scenarios, for which the fully scalable motion model (SMM) has been proposed. SMM can collaborate flawlessly with other scalabilities, such as spatial, temporal and quality, in a scalable video codec. It performs better than the nonscalable motion model. To further improve the SMM, this paper extends the algorithm to support the hierarchical B frame structure and bidirectional or multidirectional motion estimation. Furthermore, the corresponding rate distortion optimized estimation for improved efficiency in several scenarios is discussed. Several simulation results based on the updated framework are presented to verify the advantage of this extension.