Patent ID: 8149914

Claim:
A video-signal layered coding apparatus for encoding an input video signal at a plurality of coding layers exhibiting different spatial resolutions, the apparatus comprising at each coding layer: a spatial down-scaler to spatially scale down an input video signal into a resolution-lowered video signal that exhibits a resolution lower than the input video signal; a first encoder to encode the resolution-lowered video signal with a decoding procedure, thus obtaining first coded data and a first decoded signal; a spatial up-scaler to perform a high-resolution procedure by extracting a first high-frequency components signal from the first decoded signal, spatially scaling up the first high-frequency components signal so that the first high-frequency components signal exhibits resolution the same as the input original video signal, applying a level-limiting and constant-multiplication procedure with parameters to the spatial scaled-up first high-frequency components signal to generate a second high-frequency components signal, and adding the first and second high-frequency components signals to each other, thus obtaining a high-resolution scaled-up video signal, the parameters used for the level-limiting and constant-multiplication procedure being updated with comparison between the input video signal and the high-resolution scale-up video signal, the generation of the high-resolution scaled-up video signal and the comparison being repeated until a result of the comparison meets a specific requirement to obtain final parameters for the level-limiting and constant-multiplication procedure which are encoded to obtain coded parameters, and to obtain a final high-resolution scaled-up video signal; a second encoder to perform inter-spatial resolution prediction using the final high-resolution scaled-up video signal as a predictive signal generated based on the resolution-lowered video signal, with spatial and temporal prediction to obtain a spatial predictive signal and a temporal predictive signal, respectively, at the resolution of the input video signal, followed by selecting one among the predictive signal, the spatial predictive signal and the temporal predictive signal or by weighting the predictive signal, the spatial predictive signal and the temporal predictive signal and combining the weighted signals, to generate an inter-spatial resolution predictive signal at the resolution of the input video signal, and subtracting the inter-spatial resolution predictive signal from the input video signal, thus obtaining second coded data that exhibits a resolution higher than the resolution-lowered video signals; and a multiplexer to multiplex the first and second coded data and the coded parameters into a bitstream.