• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.10 no.3
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• pp.1195-1211
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• 2016

The emerging video coding standard High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) has shown almost 40% bit-rate reduction over the state-of-the-art Advanced Video Coding (AVC) standard but at about 40% computational complexity overhead. The main reason for HEVC computational complexity is the inter prediction that accounts for 60%-70% of the whole encoding time. In this paper, we propose several fast coding unit (CU) encoding schemes based on the Merge mode and motion estimation information to reduce the computational complexity caused by the HEVC inter prediction. Firstly, an early Merge mode decision method based on motion estimation (EMD) is proposed for each CU size. Then, a Merge mode based early termination method (MET) is developed to determine the CU size at an early stage. To provide a better balance between computational complexity and coding efficiency, several fast CU encoding schemes are surveyed according to the rate-distortion-complexity characteristics of EMD and MET methods as a function of CU sizes. These fast CU encoding schemes can be seamlessly incorporated in the existing control structures of the HEVC encoder without limiting its potential parallelization and hardware acceleration. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed schemes achieve 19%-46% computational complexity reduction over the HEVC test model reference software, HM 16.4, at a cost of 0.2%-2.4% bit-rate increases under the random access coding configuration. The respective values under the low-delay B coding configuration are 17%-43% and 0.1%-1.2%.

• Journal of Korea Multimedia Society
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• v.15 no.7
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• pp.859-869
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• 2012

The Multi-view Video Coding (MVC) which is exploiting disparities between views has been developed to improve the coding efficiency of multi-view video. But MVC has a problem of having high computing complexities because of disparity estimation. This paper propose a fast mode decision for non-anchor picture to reduce the computational time of MVC. The proposed method uses two phases. Anchor pictures in hierarchical B picture structure have a higher correlation with prediction mode selection of non-anchor pictures, so in the first phase, prediction mode of non-anchor pictures is selected by exploiting the macro-block regions in anchor picture. In the second phase, we select a reference direction of inter prediction mode exploiting a higher correlation among reference directions of inter prediction modes of 7 block sizes. Experimental results show that the proposed method could save average about 44% in the encoding time with negligible coding efficiency losses.

• Journal of Broadcast Engineering
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• v.17 no.3
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• pp.471-479
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• 2012

Intra prediction is one of the significant techniques in H.264/AVC reference software; however, it has heavy computational complexity. In order to solve this problem, many fast algorithms have been proposed. In this paper, we propose a fast intra mode decision algorithm which predicts the edge direction of the current block using sub-sampled pixels to reduce high computational complexity of the H.264/AVC encoder. The proposed algorithm shows that it not only improves the coding performance but also reduces the computational complexity of the H.264/AVC encoder compared to previous algorithms. The experimental results show that the proposed algorithm achieves the encoding time reduction of 75.93% on an average with slight peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) drop and bit-rate increment.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SP
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• v.46 no.2
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• pp.48-56
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• 2009

We propose a fast intra mode skip decision algorithm for H.264/AVC video encoding. Although newly added MB encoding algorithms based on various prediction methods increase compression ratio, they require a significant increase in the computational complexity because we calculate rate-distortion(RD) cost for all possible MB coding modes and then choose the best one. In this paper, we propose a fast mode decision algorithm based on an adaptive motion vector map(AMVM) method for H.264/AVC video encoding to reduce the processing time for the inter frame. We verify that the proposed algorithm generates generally good performances in PSNR, bit rates, and processing time.

• Proceedings of the Korean Institute of Information and Commucation Sciences Conference
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• 2016.10a
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• pp.969-972
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• 2016

In this paper, we propose an algorithm of angular mode selection for high-performance HEVC intra prediction. HEVC intra prediction is used to remove the spatial redundancy. Intra prediction has a total of 35 modes and block size of $64{\times}64$ to $4{\times}4$. Intra prediction has a high amount of calculation and operational time due to performing all 35 modes for each block size for the best cost. The angular mode algorithm proposed has a simple difference between pixels of the original image and the selected angular mode. A decision is made to select one angular mode plus planar mode and DC mode to perform the intra prediction and determine the mode with the best cost. In effect, only three modes are executed compared to the traditional 35 modes. Performance evaluation index used are BD-PSNR and BD-Bitrate. For the proposed algorithm, BD-PSNR results averagely increased by 0.035 and BD-Bitrate decreased by 0.623 relative to the HM-16.9 intra prediction. In addition, the encoding time is decreased by about 6.905%.

• Journal of Broadcast Engineering
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• v.21 no.2
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• pp.140-148
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• 2016

HEVC(High Efficient Video Coding) has twice times better compression ratio than H.264/AVC, but since the computational complexity has significantly increased in the encoder side, it may cause difficulty in real-time SW implementation in the encoder side. This paper proposes two methods about fast intra prediction. First, fast mode and prediction unit decision method using transform coefficients of the original block is proposed. and second, fast prediction unit decision method using coded block flag(cbf) is proposed. The proposed method achieves 42% encoder speed up with 0.8% bitrate increase compared with HM16.0.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society of Broadcast Engineers Conference
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• 2013.11a
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• pp.71-74
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• 2013

차세대 동영상 표준 코덱인 High Efficiency Video Coding(HEVC)은 기존의 AVC/H.264 보다 동일 화질 대비 최대 약 2배의 압축 성능을 보여준다. 이러한 HEVC의 성능을 얻기 위하여 복잡한 연산이 많은 기법이 도입되었고 이로 인하여 HEVC의 시간 복잡도는 AVC/H.264보다 더욱 증가하였다. HEVC의 시간 복잡도를 줄이기 위해서 다양한 고속 알고리즘이 논의되고 있고 인트라 예측 모드에서의 고속 알고리즘 연구 또한 많은 연구가 이루어지고 있다. 본 논문에서는 인트라 예측 모드 결정과정에서 HEVC에 구현된 Rough mode decision(RMD)와 Most probable mode(MPM)의 결과를 활용하여 고속화된 최종예측 모드 결정 방법을 제안한다. 실험 결과, HM 10.0의 All Intra 환경을 기준으로 BD-rate에서 약 0.9%의 손실과 함께 평균 24%의 속도 향상을 얻을 수 있었다.

• Journal of Broadcast Engineering
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• v.17 no.5
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• pp.725-733
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• 2012

MPEG and VCEG have constituted a collaboration team called JCT-VC(Joint Collaborative Team on Video Coding) and have been developing the HEVC(High Efficiency Video Coding) standard. The next generation video coding standard HEVC shows higher compression rate compared with the H.264/AVC standard, but the encoder computational complexity of the HEVC encoder is significantly high. In order to reduce this computational complexity in the HEVC encoder, a fast prediction unit decision is proposed. The proposed fast prediction unit decision method reduces the encoder complexity by skipping the remaining prediction units if the current prediction unit does not have any non-zero quantized transform coefficient. The proposed method reduces the encoder computational complexity by 50.3% comparing with HM6.0 but it maintains the same level of coding efficiency.

• ETRI Journal
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• v.32 no.4
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• pp.577-587
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• 2010

The layered coding structure of scalable video coding (SVC) with adaptive inter-layer prediction causes noticeable computational complexity increments when compared to existing video coding standards. To lighten the computational complexity of SVC, we present a fast algorithm to speed up the inter-mode decision process. The proposed algorithm terminates inter-mode decision early in the enhancement layers by estimating the rate-distortion (RD) cost from the macroblocks of the base layer and the enhancement layer in temporal, spatial, and inter-layer directions. Moreover, a search range decision algorithm is also proposed in this paper to further increase the motion estimation speed by using the motion vector information from temporal, spatial, or inter-layer domains. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm can determine the best mode and provide more efficient total coding time saving with very slight RD performance degradation for spatial and quality scalabilities.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society of Broadcast Engineers Conference
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• 2009.01a
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• pp.170-173
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• 2009

In this paper, we propose a fast intra prediction mode selection method in Scalable Video Coding(SVC) which is an emerging video coding standard as an extension of H.264/Advanced Video Coding(H.264/AVC). The proposed method decides a candidate intra prediction mode based on the characteristic of macroblock smoothness. Statistical analysis is applied to computing that smoothness in spatial enhancement layer. We also propose an early termination scheme for Intra_BL mode decision where the RD cost value of Intra_BL is utilized. Compared with JSVM software, our scheme can reduce about 55% of the computation complexity of intra prediction on average, while the performance degradation is negligible; For low QP values, the average PSNR loss is very negligible, equivalently the bit rate increases by 0.01%. For high QP values, the average PSNR loss is less than 0.01dB, which equals to 0.25% increase in bitrate on average.