BLOCK-BASED ADAPTIVE BIT ALLOCATION FOR REFENCE MEMORY REDUCTION

In this paper, we propose an effective memory reduction algorithm to reduce the amount of reference frame buffer and memory bandwidth in video encoder and decoder. In general video codecs, decoded previous frames should be stored and referred to reduce temporal redundancy. Recently, reference frames are recompressed for memory efficiency and bandwidth reduction between a main processor and external memory. However, these algorithms could hurt coding efficiency. Several algorithms have been proposed to reduce the amount of reference memory with minimum quality degradation. They still suffer from quality degradation with fixed-bit allocation. In this paper, we propose an adaptive block-based min-max quantization that considers local characteristics of image. In the proposed algorithm, basic process unit is $8{\times}8$ for memory alignment and apply an adaptive quantization to each $4{\times}4$ block for minimizing quality degradation. We found that the proposed algorithm could improve approximately 37.5% in coding efficiency, compared with an existing memory reduction algorithm, at the same memory reduction rate.