• The Journal of Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences
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• v.33 no.4C
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• pp.321-329
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• 2008

H.264/AVC video coding standard enables a considerably higher improvement in coding efficiency compared with previous standards such as MPEG-2, H.263 and MPEG-4. To achieve this, for each macro-block in H.264/AVC, Rate-Distortion Optimization (RDO) technique is employed to select the best motion vector, reference frame, and macro-block mode. As a result, computational complexity is increased significantly whereas RDO achieve higher improvement. This paper presents fast intra mode selection algorithm based on constraints of frequency characteristics which are derived from intra coding modes of H.264/AVC. First of all, we observe the features of each intra mode through the frequency analysis of image. And then proposed Frequency Error Costs (FECs) are calculated to select the best mode which has minimum cost. Computational complexity is considerably reduced because rate-distortion costs only calculate the candidate modes which are set of best mode and its neighbouring two modes. Experimental results show that proposed algorithm reduces the complexity dramatically maintaining the rate-distortion performance compared with H.264/AVC reference software.

• 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.

• 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 the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SP
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• v.44 no.2 s.314
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• pp.1-11
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• 2007

H.264/AVC uses variable block sizes to achieve significant coding gain. It has 7 different coding modes having different motion compensation block sizes in Inter slice, and 2 different intra prediction modes in Intra slice. This fine-tuned new coding feature has achieved far more significant coding gain compared with previous video coding standards. However, extremely high computational complexity is required when rate-distortion optimization (RDO) algorithm is used. This computational complexity is a major problem in implementing real-time H.264/AVC encoder on computationally constrained devices. Therefore, there is a clear need for complexity reduction algorithm of H.264/AVC such as fast mode decision. In this paper, we propose a fast mode decision with early $P8\times8$ mode rejection based on block size activity using large block history map (LBHM). Simulation results show that without any meaningful degradation, the proposed method reduces whole encoding time on average by 53%. Also the hybrid usage of the proposed method and the early SKIP mode decision in H.264/AVC reference model reduces whole encoding time by 63% on average.

• The Journal of Korea Institute of Information, Electronics, and Communication Technology
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• v.6 no.2
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• pp.71-75
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• 2013

Recently proliferating heterogeneous multimedia service environments should be able to deal with many different transmission speeds, image sizes, or qualities of video. However, not many existing video compression standards satisfy those necessities. To satisfy the functional requirements, the standardization of the H.264/AVC Scalable Extension (SE) technique has been recently completed. It is an extension of the H.264/AVC which can encode several image sizes and qualities at the same time as a single bitstream. To perform optimum mode decision, motion estimation is performed for all MB modes, and the RD costs are compared to identify an MB mode with the smallest RD cost. This increases computational complexity of H.264/AVC SE encoding. In this paper, we propose an early skip mode detection scheme to reduce candidate modes and suggest an algorithm of fast mode decision utilizing reference modes according to the mode history.

• Journal of the Korea Computer Industry Society
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• v.6 no.5
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• pp.801-812
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• 2005

H.264/AVC is the international video coding standard which has significant improvements of coding efficiency. ITU-T(International Telecommunication Union-Telecommunication standardization sector) and MPEG(Moving Picture Experts Group) adopts various complex coding tool such as variable block size motion, multiple reference frames, quarter-pel motion estimation/compensation (ME/MC) and rate-distortion(RD) optimization, etc. H.264 reference model employs complex mode decision technique based on RD optimization which requires high computational complexity. In this paper, we propose an efficient coding mode decision based on the cost distribution of RD in the macroblock coding mode sequence. Simulation results show that the proposed method reduces encoding time by 34% on average and save the number of computing RD cost by 82%.

• The Journal of Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences
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• v.29 no.8C
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• pp.1055-1061
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• 2004

In this paper, we propose an efficient dynamic coding scheme by using multiple codewords in H.264/AVC entropy coding. The exponential Golomb (Exp-Golomb) codewords used in H.264/AVC do not reflect enough the symbol distributions of the combined syntax element in (7) due to their static probability distribution characteristics. However, the multiple codewords in this paper have different statistical characteristics. we propose a dynamic coding scheme by using selectively among multiple codewords to encode the combined syntax element according to given image sequences. Simulation results show that our proposed scheme outperforms the existing (7) method in compression efficiency without loss of quality.

• The Journal of the Institute of Internet, Broadcasting and Communication
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• v.14 no.6
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• pp.99-105
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• 2014

The performance improvement in MPEG-4 AVC is provided at the expense for higher computational complexity. Most of the complexity is caused by Inter prediction. To improve coding efficiency, some functions are added in H.264/MPEG-4 AVC, such as variable block size motion compensation, multi reference frame and quarter-pel motion compensation. A fast macroblock partition decision method is proposed in this paper. The macroblock size is efficiently determined by using the pixel value difference between encoding and the referred macroblock.

• Journal of Broadcast Engineering
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• v.15 no.2
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• pp.280-289
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• 2010

The H.264/AVC standard uses efficient inter prediction technologies improving the coding efficiency by reducing temporal redundancy between images. However, since H.264/AVC does not efficiently encode a video sequence that occurs a local illumination change, the coding efficiency of H.264/AVC is decreased when a local illumination change happens in video. In this paper, we propose an improved motion compensation using adjacent pixels and motion vector refinement to efficiently encode local illumination changes. The proposed method always improves the BD-PSNR (Bj$\o$ntegaard Delta Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio) of 0.01 ~ 0.21 dB compared with H.264/AVC.

• Journal of Korea Multimedia Society
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• v.11 no.2
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• pp.163-174
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• 2008

The H.264/AVC provides gains in compression efficiency of up to 50% over a wide range of bit rates and video resolutions compared to previous standards. However, to achieve such high coding efficiency, the complexity of H.264/AVC encoder is also increased drastically than previous ones, mainly because of mode decision. In this paper, we propose a three-step mode decision algorithm for fast encoding in H.264/AVC. In the first step, we select skip mode or inter mode by considering the temporal correlation and spatial correlation. In the second step, if the result of the first step is INTER mode, we select one group between two groups for final mode. In the third step, we select final mode by exploiting the pixel values of error macroblock or the modes of adjacent macroblocks. Simulations show that the proposed method reduces the encoding time by 42% on average without any significant PSNR losses.