A system is provided for determining a collocated reference picture to enable encoding and decoding of a current picture for high efficiency video coding (HEVC). The collocated picture is identified by accessing syntax that can include an index for a list0 and a list1, a reference picture set number indicating the number of pictures in list0 and list1, and a flag indicating if the collocated picture is in list0 or list1. The system can further use slice type to determine if both list0 and list1 should be accessed.