• The Journal of Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences
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• v.33 no.12C
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• pp.1039-1045
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• 2008

The H.264/AVC video coding standard shows extremely higher coding efficiency, but it causes high computational complexity. Especially, the intra mode decision using the rate-distortion method requires many computations. Thus, the efficient intra mode decision methods have been proposed by decreasing the encoding complexity. In this paper, we propose an efficient intra mode decision algorithm using $4{\times}4$ integer transform coefficients in the conversion of MPEG-2 to H.264 standard. It is shown that the proposed algorithm reduces encoding time and complexity compared to the conventional algorithm, while showing similar PSNR performance.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society of Broadcast Engineers Conference
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• 2014.11a
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• pp.216-217
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• 2014

고효율 비디오 부호화/복호화 표준인 HEVC(High Efficiency Video Coding)는 ITU-T(VCEG)와 ISO-IEC(MPEG)이 JCT-VC라는 팀을 이루어 공동으로 표준화를 진행 하였다. 이 표준화에서는 기존 표준기술 보다 다양한 예측 방향을 통한 인트라 예측 방법을 사용하며, 이로 인해 부호기의 계산량이 매우 높은 단점을 가진다. 제안하는 방법은 예측단위인 PU의 서브샘플링 값을 구하고 이의 경사도를 이용해 율-왜곡 최적화 방법(Rate-Distortion Optimization)의 계산에 사용되는 후보 모드를 줄이는 방법으로 부호기의 속도를 개선하는 방법이다. 이 방법은 기존 방법보다 적은 비트 손실에도 불구하고 약 19%의 부호화 속도 향상을 가진다.

• Proceedings of the IEEK Conference
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• 2006.06a
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• pp.291-292
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• 2006

This paper presents rate-distortion optimization that is considered sequence statistics(complexity) to choose the best macroblock mode decision in H.264. In previous work, Lagrange multiplier is derived by the function of constant value 0.85 and QP so that is not the proper Lagrange multilplier for any image sequence. The proposed algorithm solves the problem by changing constant value 0.85 into adaptive value which is influenced by image complexity, and by reducing the encoder complexity to estimate the image statistics with the multiplication of transformed, quantized rate and distortion. Proposed algorithm is achieved the bit-rate saving up to 5% better than previous method.

• The Journal of Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences
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• v.33 no.11C
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• pp.925-931
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• 2008

In video coding standard H.264/AVC, variable block size mode algorithm improves compression efficiency but has need of a large amount of computation for various block modes and mode decision. Meanwhile, decided inter block modes depend on the complexity of a block image, and then the more complex a macroblock is, the smaller its block size is. This paper proposes fast inter block mode decision algorithm. It limits valid block modes to the block modes with a great chance for decision using the image complexity and carries out motion estimation rate-distortion optimization with only the valid block modes. In addition to that, it applies fast motion estimation PDE to the valid block modes with only the $16{\times}16$ block mode. The reference software JM 9.5 was executed to estimate the proposed algorithm's performance. The simulation results showed that the proposed algorithm could save about 24.12% of the averaged motion estimation time while keeping the image quality and the bit rate to be -0.02dB and -0.12% on the average, respectively.

• The Journal of Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences
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• v.30 no.11C
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• pp.1098-1107
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• 2005

The emerging H.264/AVC video coding standard improves coding performance significantly by adopting many advanced techniques. This is achieved at the expense of great increasing encoder complexity. Specifically the intra prediction using RDO examines all possible combinations of coding modes, which depend on spatial directional correlation with adjacent blocks. For 4${\times}$4 luma blocks, there are 9 modes, and for 16${\times}$16 luma and 8${\times}$8 chroma blocks, there are 4 modes, respectively. Therefore the number of mode combinations for each macroblock is 592. This paper presents a method to reduce the RDO complexity using simple directional masks and neighboring modes. According to the proposed method, we reduce the number of mode combinations to 132 at the most. Experimental results show the proposed method reduces the encoding time up to $70\%$ with negligible loss of PSNR and bitrate increase compared to the H.264/AVC exhaustive search.

• Journal of Broadcast Engineering
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• v.20 no.6
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• pp.862-870
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• 2015

The RDO (Rate Distortion Optimization) process of HEVC results in good coding efficiency, but relatively requires much encoding time. In order to reduce the encoding time of RDO process, this paper proposes a method of fast intra prediction mode decision using DCT coefficients distributions and the existence of DCT coefficients. The proposed fast Intra coding sets the number of intra prediction mode candidates to three(3) from the RMD (Rough Mode Decision) process in HM16.0 reference SW and reduces the number of candidates one more time by investigating DCT coefficients distribution. After that, if there exists a quantized DCT block having all zero coefficient values for a specific candidate before the RDO process, the candidate is chosen without the RDO process. The proposed method reduces the encoder complexity on average 46%, while the coding efficiency is 2.1% decreased compared with the HEVC encoder.

• Journal of Broadcast Engineering
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• v.17 no.5
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• pp.765-780
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• 2012

In this paper, we propose a fast mode decision method that determines the coding unit depth for enhancement layers to improve an encoding speed of a scalable video encoder based on HEVC. To decide the coding unit depth of the enhancement layer, firstly, the coding unit depth of the corresponded coding unit in the basement layer is employed. At this stage, the final CU depth is decided by calculating the rate-distortion costs of one lower depth to one upper depth of the referenced depth. The proposed method can reduce a computational load since it does not calculate the rate-distortion costs for all the depths of a target CU. We found that the proposed algorithm decreases encoding complexity of 26% with approximately 1.4% bit increment, compared with the simulcast encoder of the HM 4.0.

• The Journal of Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences
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• v.32 no.8C
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• pp.720-728
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• 2007

For the improvement of coding efficiency, the H.264/AVC video coding standard employs new coding tools compared with existing coding standards. However, due to these new coding tools, the complexity of H.2641AVC encoder is greatly increased. Specially, Inter/Intra mode decision method of H.264/AVC using RDO(rate-distortion optimization) technique is one of the most complex parts in H.264/AVC. In this paper, we focus on the complexity reduction in macroblock mode decision considering coding efficiency. From the simulation results, the proposed algorithm reduce the encoding time by maximum 80% of total, and reduce the bitrate of the overall sequences by $8{\sim}10%$ on the average compared with existing coding methods.

• Journal of Broadcast Engineering
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• v.12 no.3
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• pp.250-265
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• 2007

In this paper, a fast intermode decision scheme is introduced by efficiently performing the mode decision using statistical hypothesis testing for hierarchical B-picture coding of SVC, in which much computational power is expensed for combined variable block sizes and hierarchical B-pictures. The hypothesis testing in the proposed method is performed on $16{\times}16\;and\;8{\times}8$ blocks to have early termination for RD computation of all possible modes. The early termination in intermode decision is performed by comparing the pixel values of current blocks and corresponding motion-compensated blocks. The proposed scheme exhibits effective early termination behavior in intermode decision and leads to a significant reduction up to 69% in computational complexity with slight increment in bit amounts. The degradation of visual quality turns out to be negligible in terms of PSNR values.

• The Journal of Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences
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• v.33 no.10C
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• pp.820-828
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• 2008

In order to achieve high coding efficiency, H.264/AVC video coding standard adopts the techniques such as variable block size coding, motion estimation with quarter-pel precision, multiple reference frames, rate-distortion optimization, and etc. However, these coding methods have a defect to greatly increase the complexity for motion estimation. Particularly, from multiple reference frame motion estimation, the computational burden increases in proportion to the number of the searched reference frames. Therefore, we propose the method to reduce the complexity by controlling the number of the searched reference frames in motion estimation. Proposed algorithm uses the optimal reference frame information in both $P16{\times}16$ mode and the adjacent blocks, thus omits unnecessary searching process in the rest of inter modes. Experimental results show the proposed method can save an average of 57.31% of the coding time with negligible quality and bit-rate difference. This method also can be adopted with any of the existing motion estimation algorithm. Therefore, additional performance improvement can be obtained.