ENHANCED REFERENCE REGION UTILIZATION FOR SCALABLE VIDEO CODING

Techniques to identify one or more candidate reference blocks used to generate a prediction block to encode a current coding block. The candidate reference blocks can be in the same layer as the current coding block or a different layer. In addition, the candidate reference blocks do not have to be co-located with the current coding block. Motion vectors and shift vectors can be used to identify the one or more candidate reference blocks. In addition, uniform and non-uniform weighting can be applied to the one or more candidate reference blocks to generate the prediction block. Accordingly, an encoder can determine and identify reference blocks to a decoder that can provide desirable rate-distortion cost.