Many applications that employ video encoding operate on fixed or limited power. Mobile devices such as cellular telephones or sensors, for example, have a fixed amount of total battery power. Much of this fixed amount of battery power may be consumed by video encoding operations, which are some of the most dominant power-consuming operations in wireless video communication. Because much of the available power is consumed by these operations, the amount of time that the devices are capable of operating may be severely limited. As another example, real-time video coding systems require video coding to be completed in a fixed amount of time (e.g., one frame/group of pictures per fixed amount of time/computation). In this case, computationally intensive video coding processes are also inefficient.
Therefore, there is a need in the art for a method and apparatus for complexity-scalable video coding that efficiently allocates computations in video coding process.