• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SP
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• v.44 no.4 s.316
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• pp.8-16
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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 K264/AVC standard encoder is greatly increased. Specifically, the inter/intra mode decision method 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. In the proposed method, we reduce the complexity of the $4{\times}4$ mode decision process using $4{\times}4$ simple square filters, and using spatial block correlation method. Additionally, exploiting the best mode of sub_macroblock in $Inter8{\times}8$ mode, we proposed an algorithm to eliminate some intra modes in current macroblock mode decision process. In addition, we employed a method to raise the probability to select SKIP, $Intra16{\times}16$, and $Intra16{\times}16$ modes which usually show low complexity and low bitrate compared with other modes. From the simulation results, the proposed algorithm reduce the encoding time by maximum 83% of total, and reduce the bitrate of the overall sequences by $8{\sim}10%$ on the average compared with existing coding methods.

• IEMEK Journal of Embedded Systems and Applications
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• v.11 no.4
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• pp.235-241
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• 2016

Compared to the former H.264 standard, the number of the prediction modes has highly increased in HEVC intra prediction. Compression efficiency and accurate prediction are significantly improved. However, the computational complexity increases as well. To solve this problem, this paper proposes the new scheme where not only prediction modes but also block partition candidate are early chosen. Compared to the original intra prediction in HEVC, the proposed scheme achieves about 38% reduction in processing cycles with a marginal loss in compression efficiency.

• The Transactions of The Korean Institute of Electrical Engineers
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• v.56 no.11
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• pp.2036-2039
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• 2007

This paper proposes an enhanced adaptive mode decision scheme for fast H.264 encoders. By efficiently predicting AZCB (All Zero Coefficient Block), the proposed scheme can encode motion pictures in H.264 up to 2.86 and 1.68 times faster than JM9.3 and AMD [1], respectively. Besides, this scheme significantly reduces the encoding performance fluctuation of AMD across tested bit-rates and video sequences.

• Journal of the Korean Institute of Telematics and Electronics S
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• v.35S no.2
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• pp.89-96
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• 1998

Conventional block-based video coders induce annoying blocking artifacts in very low bitarte coding. We propose a delocking filter which is appropriate for real time operation in a conventional video decoder. The proposed algorithm uses on dimensional filtering across block boundaries horizontally and vertiaclly with two separate filtering modes. The mode decision is quite simple but is fully based on the characteristics of human visual system and video sequences. In flat regions, a strong smoothing filter is appliced; and in the other regions, a moew sophisticated smoothing filter, which is based on the frequency information around block boundaries, is used to reduce blocking artifacts without introuducing undesired blur. Eeven though the proposed deblocking filter is quite simple, simulation results show that it improves both subjective and objective image quality for various image features.

• Journal of Broadcast Engineering
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• v.13 no.3
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• pp.310-318
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• 2008

The H.264/AVC standard achieves higher coding efficiency than previous video coding standards with the rate-distortion optimization (RDO) technique which selects the best coding mode and reference frame for each macroblock. As a result, the complexity of the encoder have been significantly increased. In this paper, a fast intra-mode decision algorithm is proposed to reduce the computational load of intra-mode search, which is based on the inverse tree-structure edge prediction algorithm. First, we obtained the dominant edge for each $4{\times}4$ block from local edge information, then the RDO process is only performed by the mode which corresponds to dominant edge direction. Then, for the $8{\times}8$ (or $16{\times}16$) block stage, the dominant edge is calculated from its four $4{\times}4$ (or $16{\times}16$) blocks' dominant edges without additional calculation and the RDO process is also performed by the mode which is related to dominant edge direction. Experimental results show that proposed scheme can significantly improve the speed of the intra prediction with a negligible loss in the peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR) and a little increase of bits.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics and Information Engineers
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• v.53 no.6
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• pp.130-136
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• 2016

HEVC (High Efficiency Video Coding) extension considers screen content as one of its main candidate sources for encoding. Among the tools already included in HEVC version 1, the technique of using transform skip mode allows transform to be skipped and to perform quantization process only. It is known to improve video coding efficiency for screen contents which are characterized to have much high frequency energy. But encoding complexity increases since its encoder should decide whether transform should be used or not in each $4{\times}4$ transform block. Based on statistical correlation between IBC (Intra block copy) and transform skip modes both of which are known effective in screen contents, this paper proposes a combined method of the fast transform skip mode decision and a modified transform skip signaling which signals transform_skip_flag at CU level as a representative transform skip signal. By simulation, the proposed method is shown to reduce encoding time of $4{\times}4$ transform blocks by about 32%.

• Journal of Broadcast Engineering
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• v.20 no.2
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• pp.340-347
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• 2015

HEVC (High Efficiency Video Coding) achieves high coding efficiency by employing a quadtree-based coding unit (CU) block partitioning structure and various prediction units (PUs), and the determination of the best CU partition structure and the best PU mode based on rate-distortion (R-D) cost. However, the computation complexity of encoding also dramatically increases. In this paper, to reduce such encoding computational complexity, we propose three fast PU mode decision methods based on encoding information of upper depth as follows. In the first method, the search of PU mode of the current CU is early terminated based on the sub-CBF (Coded Block Flag) of upper depth. In the second method, the search of intra prediction modes of PU in the current CU is skipped based on the sub-Intra R-D cost of upper depth. In the last method, the search of intra prediction modes of PU in the lower depth's CUs is skipped based on the sub-CBF of the current depth's CU. Experimental results show that the three proposed methods reduce the computational complexity of HM 14.0 to 31.4%, 2.5%, and 23.4% with BD-rate increase of 1.2%, 0.11%, and 0.9%, respectively. The three methods can be applied in a combined way to be applied to both of inter prediction and intra prediction, which results in the complexity reduction of 34.2% with 1.9% BD-rate increase.

• Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society
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• v.13 no.4
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• pp.1830-1838
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• 2012

The intra prediction and the motion estimation of inter prediction occupy 70 ~ 80% of whole compression time in H.264/AVC. Compression efficiency has been higher, but complexity has increased and coding time has also increased much more. This paper proposes a block size decision method of the intra prediction and mode decision method which minimize the loss of video quality during the encoding and shorten the time spent. This paper, in addition, proposes an algorithm which determines the method of adaptive block mode for motion estimation of inter prediction. We investigated PSNR and the intra prediction and inter prediction of time-consuming calculations in order to measure video quality degradation and complexity through experiments. Consequently, when you use all three methods, these methods showed that average coding time is shortened as about 500 to 600ms in every frame in the case of all experimented videos, keeping video quality nearly similar, compared with existing methods of H.264.

• Journal of Korea Multimedia Society
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• v.11 no.7
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• pp.956-965
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• 2008

H.264/AVC is the newest video coding standard of ITU-T VCEG and the ISO/IEC MPEG, offering a significant performance improvement over previous video coding standards. However, the computational complexity of H.264/AVC is drastically increased because of new technologies such as intra prediction, variable block size, quarter-pels motion estimation/compensation, etc. In this paper, we propose a fast intra prediction scheme which has two step processing. The first step is a fast block size decision which can be calculated only in one block without considering all cases of $4{\times}4$ block and $16{\times}16$ block. The complexity of the intra prediction can be reduced by using boundary difference values of macroblock. After selecting the block size, we can make mode decision using the neighbouring reference pixels and representative pixels of the block in the second step. The experimental results show that the proposed algorithm saved on the average 41.5% encoding time without any significant PSNR losses.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society of Broadcast Engineers Conference
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• 2014.11a
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• pp.222-223
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• 2014

본 논문에서는 HEVC의 화면내 모드에서 예측을 수행할 블록의 주변적 특성을 이용한 고속 모드 결정 알고리즘을 제안한다. 기존의 화면내 예측 방법으로는 33가지 방향성 예측방법과 두 가지의 무 방향성 방법을 이용하게 된다. 이때 최적의 예측 모드를 선택하기 위하여 RD cost 계산을 하게 된다. 본 논문에서는 모드 선택의 복잡성을 줄이고 고속 모드를 결정하기 위하여 예측 할 블록의 주변 중 가장 자리와 가중치 특성을 고려하였다.