• Journal of Korea Multimedia Society
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• v.10 no.8
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• pp.997-1003
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• 2007

H.264/AVC enhances inter-frame coding performance adopting new intra and inter mode prediction in inter-frame motion prediction. H.264 encoder provides performance superior to existing standards with the prediction modes. Instead of enhanced performance, however, both predictions increase complexity of encoder and demand a lot of coding time. This paper proposes a method using local statistics of resultant intra mode, my and mode map to predict inter mode. There are relationship between intra and inter mode, and we can predict inter mode using neighboring macroblocks' resultant mode and motion vector according to the contents of frame. The experimental results show that the proposed algorithm reduces encoding time by 31% on average with a negligible loss of PSNR and bitrate.

• 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.30 no.1C
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• pp.61-72
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• 2005

For the improvement of coding efficiency, the H.264 standard uses new coding tools such as VBS, 1/4-pel accurate ME, multiple references, intra prediction, loop filter, etc. Using these coding tools, H.264 has achieved significant improvements from rate-distortion point of view compared to existing standards. However, the encoder complexity is greatly increased due to these coding tools. We focus on the complexity reduction method of MB mode selection. Among all modes which can be selected, $8{\times}8$ and intra $4{\times}4$ mode have higher complexity than the others. So we propose the methods for reduction of the $8{\times}8$ and intra $4{\times}4$ mode complexity by using information of other modes with relatively low complexity. Simulation results show that the proposed methods save up to $54.6{\%}$ of total encoding time while keeping the average decrease about 0.012dB in PSNR.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information and Communication Engineering
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• v.8 no.7
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• pp.1405-1409
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• 2004

This paper is studied new block mode decision algorithm for H.264/AVC. The fast block mode decision algorithm is consist of block range decision algorithm. The block range decision algorithm classifies the block over 8$\times$8 size or below for 16${\times}$16 macroblock to decide the size and type of sub blocks. As the sub blocks of 8$\times$8, 8r4, 4$\times$8 and 4$\times$4, which are the blocks below 8$\times$8 size, include important motion information, the exact sub block decision is required. RDC(RDO cost) is used as the matching parameter for the exact sub block decision. RDC is calculated with motion strength which is the mean value of neighbor pixels of each sub block. The sub block range decision reduces encoding arithmetic amount by 34.62% on the average more than the case not using block range decision. The block mode decision using motion strength shows improvement of PSNR of 0.05[dB].

• The Journal of Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences
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• v.32 no.3C
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• pp.269-277
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• 2007

In this paper, we present a efficient transcoding method from MPEG-2 to H.264. The proposed transcoder is the transcoding method for spatial domain which consists of MPEG-2 decoder part and H.264 encoding part. In transcoder, we can get useful information to estimate less probable modes from MPEG-2 decoder. Using this information, H.264 encoder chooses the macroblock mode of I-frame and P-frame adaptively to reduce the whole complexity of the transcoder. Our experimental result shows that the proposed algorithm can archive about $30\sim60%$ computational saving without significant degradation of visual quality and increasing of bit rate.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SP
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• v.44 no.3
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• pp.70-79
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• 2007

H.264/AVC has many repeated computation for motion estimation. Because of that, it takes much time to encode and it is very hard to implement into a real-time encoder. Many fast algorithms were proposed to reduce computation time but encoding quality couldn't be qualified. In this paper we proposed a new motion vector prediction method for efficient and fast full search H.264/AVC motion estimation. We proposed independent motion vector prediction and SAD share for motion estimation. Using our algorithm, motion estimation reduce calculation complexity 80% and less distortion of image (less PSNR drop) than previous full search scheme. We simulated our proposed method. Maximum Y PSNR drop is about 0.04 dB and average bit increasing is about 0.6%.

• The Journal of Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences
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• v.29 no.11C
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• pp.1541-1550
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• 2004

In this paper, we propose an advanced hardware architecture for fast multi-resolution motion estimation of the video coding standard MPEG-1,2 and MPEG-4 AVC. We describe the algorithm and derive hardware architecture emphasizing the importance of area for low cost and fast operation by using the shared memory, the special ram architecture, the motion vector for 4 pixel x 4 pixel, the spiral search and so on. The proposed architecture has been verified by ARM-interfaced emulation board using Excalibur Altera FPGA and also by ASIC synthesis using Samsung 0.18 m CMOS cell library. The ASIC synthesis result shows that the proposed hardware can operate at 140 MHz, processing more than 1,100 QCIF video frames or 70 4CIF video frames per second. The hardware is going to be used as a core module when implementing a complete MPEG-4 AVC video encoder ASIC for real-time multimedia application.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SP
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• v.49 no.3
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• pp.40-50
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• 2012

In this paper we propose the fast CU (Coding Unit) mode decision method. To reduce computational complexity and save encoding time of HEVC, we divided CU, PU (Prediction Unit) and TU (Transform Unit) decision process into two stages. In the first stage, because $2N{\times}2N$ PU mode is mostly selected among $2N{\times}2N$, $N{\times}2N$, $2N{\times}N$, $N{\times}N$ PU modes, proposed algorithm uses only $2N{\times}2N$ PU mode deciding depth of each CU in the LCU (Largest CU). And then, proposed method decides exact PU and TU modes at the depth level which is decided in the first stage. In addition, early skip decision rule is applied to the proposed method to obtain more efficient computational complexity reduction. The proposed method reduces computational complexity of the HEVC encoder by simplifying a CU depth decision method. We could obtain about 50% computational complexity reduction in comparison with HM 3.3 HEVC reference software while bitrate compressed by the proposed algorithm increases only 2%.

• 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.

• Journal of Broadcast Engineering
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• v.17 no.2
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• pp.354-362
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• 2012

Recently, High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) is under development jointly by MPEG and ITU-T for the next international video coding standard. Compared to the previous standards, HEVC supports variety of splitting units, such as coding unit (CU), prediction unit (PU), and transform unit (TU). Among them, it has been known that the recursive quadtree structure of CU can improve the coding efficiency while the encoding complexity is increased significantly. In this paper, a simple conditional probability to predict the early termination condition of recursive unit structure is introduced. The proposed conditional probability is estimated based on Bayes' formula from local statistics of rate-distortion costs in encoder. Experimental results show that the proposed method can reduce the total encoding time by about 32% according to the test configuration while the coding efficiency loss is 0.4%-0.5%. In addition, the encoding time can be reduced by 50% with 0.9% coding efficiency loss when the proposed method was used jointly with HM4.0 early CU termination algorithm.