Producing an Enhancement Layer Using Intermediate Data Representing a Base Layer in Scalable Video Coding

摘要

 Encoding (and subsequent decoding) of an image, e.g. in a video sequence, comprises first obtaining intermediate data representative of a base layer of the image encoded in a first compression format, the intermediate data being encoded according to a predefined data format allowing inter layer prediction of an enhancement layer of the image to be encoded in any of a plurality of second compression formats. A final bitstream is then generated by encoding the enhancement layer according to one of the second compression formats. An enhancement layer can thus be produced based on intermediate data which represents the base layer but which may involve some modifications compared to the base layer. The intermediate data may be obtained from the base layer data either through a refinement process, a filtering process or a summarization (e.g. reduction of a motion vector number per block of pixels) process. The final bitstream may include data of the base layer or the intermediate layer.