IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology
Complexity control of H.264/AVC based on mode-conditional cost probability distributions
IEEE Transactions on Multimedia - Special section on communities and media computing
Real-time H.264 video encoding in software with fast mode decision and dynamic complexity control
ACM Transactions on Multimedia Computing, Communications, and Applications (TOMCCAP)
Fast mode selection scheme for H.264/AVC inter prediction based on statistical learning method
ICME'09 Proceedings of the 2009 IEEE international conference on Multimedia and Expo
Bandwidth-rate-distortion optimized motion estimation
ICME'09 Proceedings of the 2009 IEEE international conference on Multimedia and Expo
Fast algorithm for multi-reference and variable block size motion estimation in H.264/AVC
Proceedings of the First International Conference on Internet Multimedia Computing and Service
Computation of the complexity of vector quantizers by affine modeling
Signal Processing
An enhanced fast mode decision model for spatial enhancement layers in scalable video coding
Multimedia Tools and Applications
IEEE Transactions on Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) Systems
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H.264 video coding standard supports several inter- prediction coding modes that use macroblock (MB) partitions with variable block sizes. Rate-distortion (R-D) optimal selection of both the motion vectors (MVs) and the coding mode of each MB is essential for an H.264 encoder to achieve superior coding efficiency. Unfortunately, searching for optimal MVs of each possible subblock incurs a heavy computational cost. In this paper, in order to reduce the computational burden of integer-pel motion estimation (ME) without sacrificing from the coding performance, we propose a R-D and complexity joint optimization framework. Within this framework, we develop a simple method that determines for each MB which partitions are likely to be optimal. MV search is carried out for only the selected partitions, thus reducing the complexity of the ME step. The mode selection criteria is based on a measure of spatiotemporal activity within the MB. The procedure minimizes the coding loss at a given level of computational complexity either for the full video sequence or for each single frame. For the latter case, the algorithm provides a tight upper bound on the worst case complexity/execution time of the ME module. Simulation results show that the algorithm speeds up integer-pel ME by a factor of up to 40 with less than 0.2 dB loss in coding efficiency.