• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information and Communication Engineering
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• v.10 no.11
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• pp.2020-2025
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• 2006

H.264/AVC is newest video coding standard of the ITU-T Video coding Experts Group and the ISO/IEC Moving Picture Expets Group. Recently H.264/AVC has been adopted as a video compression standard in DMB and multimedia equipments. In this paper, we propose a H.264/AVC intra frame decoder which can minimize the memory usage and chip size. The proposed intra frame decoder is described in VHDL language and simulated in model_sim. It was verified in chip level by downloading to XCV1000E FPGA chip.

• Proceedings of the KIEE Conference
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• 2006.04a
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• pp.12-14
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• 2006

This paper presents a novel scene change detection method using intra prediction mode and edge direction in H.264/AVC. When scene change occurs, there are less temporal correlation between frames, most of macro-blocks encoded in intra mode. Using this property, the method calculates the percentage of intra mode blocks in each predictive frame in order to get candidates of scene change frame. To further find scene change, we obtain edge histogram of each candidates by using eight prediction direction of intra prediction mode in H.264/AVC. We detect scene change frames with $\iota^1$-norm of edge histograms. The experimental results show that the method is efficient and robust.

• ETRI Journal
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• v.28 no.6
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• pp.721-731
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• 2006

A fast intra skip detection algorithm based on the ratedistortion (RD) cost for an inter frame (P-slices) is proposed for H.264/AVC video encoding. In the H.264/AVC coding standard, a robust rate-distortion optimization technique is used to select the best coding mode and reference frame for each macroblock (MB). There are three types of intra predictions according to profiles. These are $16{\times}16$ and $4{\times}4$ intra predictions for luminance and an $8{\times}8$ intra prediction for chroma. For the high profile, an $8{\times}8$ intra prediction has been added for luminance. The $4{\times}4$ prediction mode has 9 prediction directions with 4 directions for $16{\times}16$ and $8{\times}8$ luma, and $8{\times}8$ chrominance. In addition to the inter mode search procedure, an intra mode search causes a significant increase in the complexity and computational load for an inter frame. To reduce the computational load of the intra mode search at the inter frame, the RD costs of the neighborhood MBs for the current MB are used and we propose an adaptive thresholding scheme for the intra skip extraction. We verified the performance of the proposed scheme through comparative analysis of experimental results using joint model reference software. The overall encoding time was reduced up to 32% for the IPPP sequence type and 35% for the IBBPBBP sequence type.

• The Journal of Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences
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• v.31 no.3C
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• pp.271-278
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• 2006

Rate-constrained coding is one of the many coding-efficiency oriented tools of H.264/AVC, but mode decision process of RDO(Rate distortion optimization) requires high computational complexity. Many fast mode decision algorithms have been proposed to reduce the computational complexity of mode decision. In this paper, we propose two algorithms for reduction of mode decision in H.264/AVC, which are the fast reference frame selection and selective intra prediction mode decision. Fast reference frame selection is efficient for inter predication and selective intra prediction mode decision can effectively reduce excessive calculation load of intra prediction mode decision. The simulation results showed that the proposed methods could reduce the encoding time of the overall sequences by 44.63% on average without any noticeable degradation of the coding efficiency.

• 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.

• ETRI Journal
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• v.30 no.4
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• pp.506-515
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• 2008

The H.264/AVC standard has adopted new coding tools such as intra-prediction, variable block size, motion estimation with quarter-pixel-accuracy, loop filter, and so on. The adoption of these tools enables an H.264/AVC-coded bitstream to have more information than was possible with previous standards. In this paper, we propose an effective spatial error concealment method with low complexity in H.264/AVC intra-frame. From information included in an H.264/AVC-coded bitstream, we use prediction modes of intra-blocks to recover a damaged block. This is because the prediction direction in each prediction mode is highly correlated to the edge direction. We first estimate the edge direction of a damaged block using the prediction modes of the intra-blocks adjacent to a damaged block and classify the area inside the damaged block into edge and flat areas. Our method then recovers pixel values in the edge area using edge-directed interpolation, and recovers pixel values in the flat area using weighted interpolation. Simulation results show that the proposed method yields better video quality than conventional approaches.

• 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.

• The Journal of the Korea institute of electronic communication sciences
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• v.9 no.12
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• pp.1447-1454
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• 2014

In H.264 standard, an intra frame is the first frame of a GOP (Group of Pictures) and all macroblocks of an intra frame are encoded using the same quantization parameter. In addition, an intra frame is used for encoding the following frames of the same GOP so the encoding results of an intra frame affect the encoding results of the entire GOP. Thus, it is important to find the optimal quantization parameter of an intra frame for improving the quality of a GOP. In this paper, we propose an searching method for an optimal quantization parameter of an intra frame in real time. The proposed method uses a gradient descent method to find the optimal value based on characteristics of the optimal quantization parameters. Experimental results show that the proposed method captures the characteristics of the optimal quantization parameter and accurately estimates the optimal value.

• Journal of Broadcast Engineering
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• v.12 no.6
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• pp.611-623
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• 2007

The H.264|AVC standard incorporates an intra prediction tool into inter frame coding. However, this leads to excessive amount of increase in encoding time, thus resulting in the difficulty in real-time implementation of software encoders. In this paper, we first propose an early decision on intra prediction coding and a fast intra prediction method using the characteristics of block contents and the context of neighboring block modes for the intra prediction in the inter frame coding of H.264/AVC. Basically, the proposed methods determine a skip condition on whether the $4{\times}4$ intra prediction is to be used in the inter frame coding by considering the content characteristics of each block to be encoded and the context of its neighboring blocks. The performance of our proposed methods is compared with the Joint Model reference software version 11.0 of H.264|AVC. The experimental results show that our proposed methods allow for 41.63% reduction in the total encoding time with negligible amounts of PSNR drops and bitrate increases, compared to the original Joint Model reference software version 11.0.

• Journal of Broadcast Engineering
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• v.15 no.6
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• pp.815-829
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• 2010

In this paper, we propose a new $4{\times}4$ intra coding method by unidirectional prediction for improvement of intra-frame coding efficiency of H.264/AVC. There are $4{\times}4$, $8{\times}8$, and $16{\times}16$ intra prediction modes in the current H.264/AVC. For the $4{\times}4$ intra prediction, coding efficiency is achieved by accurate prediction with small block size in relatively complicated regions, and the $16{\times}16$ intra prediction method can predict more accurately compared to $4{\times}4$ intra prediction with only one directional information in relatively homogeneous regions. We propose a unidirectional $4{\times}4$ intra prediction method adopting a small-size prediction and one directional prediction approaches. In order to improve coding efficiency, the proposed method is conducted by $4{\times}4$ block and their prediction directions are all the same, resulting that we need to send only one directional information for each macroblock. For intra-frame coding setting, we achieve 10.47% and 1.57% coding efficiency in BD-bitrate for only $16{\times}16$ intra mode and $4{\times}4$, $16{\times}16$ intra mode, respectively.