Patent ID: 8520738

Claim:
A video decoder for decoding a bit stream corresponding to pictures of a video signal, the coded pictures being likely to include macroblocks coded in a progressive and in an interlaced way, said decoder comprising a decoding unit for decoding macroblocks coded in a progressive way, characterized in that said video decoder includes a hybrid reference construction unit for constructing, for each reference picture, a hybrid reference texture which has the property of representing said reference picture in a frame-based and in a field-based manner, said hybrid reference texture being used by said decoding unit for decoding interlaced macroblocks, wherein said hybrid reference texture includes the reference texture in frame structure as found in the bit stream and a reference texture in field structure obtained by de-interlacing and extracting the two fields in the reference picture, wherein said hybrid reference construction unit is activated on a picture basis when a flag, decoded or inferred from the bitstream, is set to a value indicating which coded pictures are interlaced.