Patent ID: 8135065

Claim:
A method of decoding a scalable video stream, in which the images may be decoded by groups of several images, each group being constituted by at least three levels of image temporal hierarchy, the images of the lowest level having the lowest time frequency and the images of each following level having a time frequency at least twice that of the images of the preceding level, a temporal hierarchy level being formed by at least one predetermined time interval, a time interval separating two images in that temporal hierarchy level, wherein: during the decoding of at least one temporal hierarchy level, at least one item of information is obtained including at least an item of information representing the motion in the images of the video stream over at least one time interval of said temporal hierarchy, wherein with respect to the item of information representing the motion of the images of the video stream, a parameter is calculated from the content of the images of the video stream over said one time interval, and an order in the decoding of the images of each group of images is defined as a function of said information obtained.