• Journal of KIISE:Computing Practices and Letters
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• v.14 no.8
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• pp.793-797
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• 2008

To achieve flexible visual contents adaptation for multimedia communications, the ISO/IEC MPEG & ITU-T VCEG form the JVT to develop an SVC amendment for the H.264/AVC standard. JVT uses inter-layer prediction that can improve the rate-distortion efficiency of the enhancement layer. But inter-layer prediction causes computational complexity to be increased. In this paper, we propose a fast mode decision for inter frame coding. It makes use of the correlation between optimized prediction mode and its RD cost. Experimental results show that the proposed schemes save up to 38% of encoding time with a negligible coding loss and bit-rate increase.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.9 no.9
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• pp.1-8
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• 2009

H.264/AVC video coding standard uses the rate distortion optimization method which determines the best coding mode for macroblock(MB) to improve coding efficiency. Whereas RDO selects the best coding mode, it causes the heavy computational burden comparing with previous standards. To reduce the complexity, in this paper, a fast intra prediction mode decision algorithm using directional gradients is proposed. The proposed algorithm is composed of 2-path structure. In the first path, $16{\times}16$ intra prediction mode is determined using directional gradients. In the second path, 3 modes instead of 9 modes are chosen for RDO to decide the best mode for $4{\times}4$ block. Finally, the two modes determined in the two-path decision process are compared to decide the final block mode. Experimental results show that the computation time of the proposed method is decreased to about 77% of the exhaustive mode decision method with negligible quality loss.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.13 no.6
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• pp.3165-3181
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• 2019

Spherical videos, which are also called 360-degree videos, have become increasingly popular due to the rapid development of virtual reality technology. However, the large amount of data in such videos is a huge challenge for existing transmission system. To use the existing encode framework, it should be converted into a 2D image plane by using a specific projection format, e.g. the equi-rectangular projection (ERP) format. The existing high-efficiency video coding standard (HEVC) can effectively compress video content, but its enormous computational complexity makes the time spent on compressing high-frame-rate and high-resolution 360-degree videos disproportionate to the benefits of compression. Focusing on the ERP format characteristics of 360-degree videos, this work develops a fast decision algorithm for predicting the coding unit depth interval and adaptive mode decision for intra prediction mode. The algorithm makes full use of the video characteristics of the ERP format by dealing with pole and equatorial areas separately. It sets different reference blocks and determination conditions according to the degree of stretching, which can reduce the coding time while ensuring the quality. Compared with the original reference software HM-16.16, the proposed algorithm can reduce time consumption by 39.3% in the all-intra configuration, and the BD-rate increases by only 0.84%.

• ETRI Journal
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• v.38 no.5
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• pp.807-817
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• 2016

A novel fast algorithm is suggested for a coding unit (CU) mode decision using pseudo rate-distortion based on a separated encoding structure in High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC). A conventional HEVC encoder requires a large computational time for a CU mode prediction because prediction and transformation procedures are applied to obtain a rate-distortion cost. Hence, for the practical application of HEVC encoding, it is necessary to significantly reduce the computational time of CU mode prediction. As described in this paper, under the proposed separated encoder structure, it is possible to decide the CU prediction mode without a full processing of the prediction and transformation to obtain a rate-distortion cost based on a suitable condition. Furthermore, to construct a suitable condition to improve the encoding speed, we employ a pseudo rate-distortion estimation based on a Hadamard transformation and a simple quantization. The experimental results show that the proposed method achieves a 38.68% reduction in the total encoding time with a similar coding performance to that of the HEVC reference model.

• Journal of KIISE:Computing Practices and Letters
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• v.15 no.4
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• pp.280-283
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• 2009

To improve coding performance of scalable video coding which is an emerging video coding standard as an extension of H.264/AVC, SVC uses not only intra prediction and inter prediction but inter-layer prediction. This causes a problem that computational complexity is increased. In this paper, we propose an efficient intra prediction mode decision method in spatial enhancement layer to reduce the computational complexity. The proposed method selects Inra_BL mode using RD cost of Intra_BL in advance. After that, intra mode is decided by only comparing DC modes. Experimental results show that the proposed method reduces 59% of the computation complexity of intra prediction coding, while the degradation in video quality is negligible.

• ETRI Journal
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• v.36 no.4
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• pp.528-536
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• 2014

High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) is the most recent video coding standard to achieve a higher coding performance than the previous H.264/AVC. In order to accomplish this improved coding performance, HEVC adopted several advanced coding tools; however, these cause heavy computational complexity. Similar to previous video coding standards, motion estimation (ME) of HEVC requires the most computational complexity; this is because ME is conducted for three inter prediction modes - namely, uniprediction in list 0, uniprediction in list 1, and biprediction. In this paper, we propose an efficient inter prediction mode (EIPM) decision method to reduce the complexity of ME. The proposed EIPM method computes the priority of all inter prediction modes and performs ME only on a selected inter prediction mode. Experimental results show that the proposed method reduces computational complexity arising from ME by up to 51.76% and achieves near similar coding performance compared to HEVC test model version 10.1.

• Journal of Korea Multimedia Society
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• v.14 no.7
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• pp.872-883
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• 2011

SVC is an emerging video coding standard as an extension of H.264/AVC. This standard uses inter prediction, intra prediction and a new inter-layer prediction to improve coding performance of enhancement layers. However, it has high computational complexity. In this paper, we propose an efficient intra prediction mode decision method in the spatial enhancement layer to reduce the computational complexity. The proposed method consists of two phases. In the first phase, Intra_BL mode is selected using the RD cost of Intra_BL in advance. We exploit the fact that the RD cost and prediction mode are similar to those of neighbor macroblocks. In the second phase, we predict the enhancement layer mode using correlation between intra mode of enhancement layer and that of the base layer. Experimental results show that the proposed method could save from 48.15% to 56.32% in encoding time while degradation in video quality is negligible.

• ETRI Journal
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• v.29 no.6
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• pp.736-744
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• 2007

We propose a fast macroblock (MB) mode prediction and decision algorithm based on temporal correlation for P-slices in the H.264/AVC video standard. There are eight block types for temporal decorrelation, including SKIP mode based on rate-distortion (RD) optimization. This scheme gives rise to exhaustive computations (search) in the coding procedure. To overcome this problem, a thresholding method for fast inter mode decision using a MB tracking scheme to find the most correlated block and RD cost of the correlated block is suggested for early stop of the inter mode determination. We propose a two-step inter mode candidate selection method using statistical analysis. In the first step, a mode is selected based on the mode information of the co-located MB from the previous frame. Then, an adaptive thresholding scheme is applied using the RD cost of the most correlated MB. Secondly, additional candidate modes are considered to determine the best mode of the initial candidate modes that does not satisfy the designed thresholding rule. Comparative analysis shows that a speed-up factor of up to 70.59% is obtained when compared with the full mode search method with a negligible bit increment and a minimal loss of image quality.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SP
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• v.41 no.6
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• pp.165-173
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• 2004

H.264 is the newest international video coding standard that provides high coding efficiency. A macroblock in H.264 has 7 different motion-compensation block sizes in the Inter mode, and several different prediction directions in the Intra mode. In order to achieve as highest coding efficiency as possible, H.264 reference model employs complex mode decision technique based on rate-distortion (RD) optimization which requires high computational complexity. In this paper, we propose two techniques -'early SKIP mode decision' and 'selective intra mode decision' - which can further reduce the computational complexity. Simulation results show that without considerable performance degradation, the proposed methods reduce encoding time by 30% on average and save the number of computing rate-distortion cost by 72%.

• Journal of Information Processing Systems
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• v.16 no.4
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• pp.959-974
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• 2020

High efficiency video coding (HEVC) employs quadtree coding tree unit (CTU) structure to improve its coding efficiency, but at the same time, it also requires a very high computational complexity due to its exhaustive search processes for an optimal coding unit (CU) partition. With the aim of solving the problem, a fast CU size decision optimal algorithm based on neighborhood prediction is presented for HEVC in this paper. The contribution of this paper lies in the fact that we successfully use the partition information of neighborhood CUs in different depth to quickly determine the optimal partition mode for the current CU by neighborhood prediction technology, which can save much computational complexity for HEVC with negligible RD-rate (rate-distortion rate) performance loss. Specifically, in our scheme, we use the partition information of left, up, and left-up CUs to quickly predict the optimal partition mode for the current CU by neighborhood prediction technology, as a result, our proposed algorithm can effectively solve the problem above by reducing many unnecessary prediction and partition operations for HEVC. The simulation results show that our proposed fast CU size decision algorithm based on neighborhood prediction in this paper can reduce about 19.0% coding time, and only increase 0.102% BD-rate (Bjontegaard delta rate) compared with the standard reference software of HM16.1, thus improving the coding performance of HEVC.