Low-complexity motion estimation for the Scalable Video Coding extension of H.264/AVC

The recently standardized Scalable Video Coding(SVC) extension of H.264/AVC allows bitstream scalability with improved rate-distortion efficiency with respect to the classical Simulcasting approach, at the cost of an increased computational complexity of the encoding process. So one critical issue related to practical deployment of SVC is the complexity reduction, fundamental to use it in consumer applications. In this paper, we present a fully scalable fast motion estimation algorithm that enables an excellent complexity performance.