• 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.

• ETRI Journal
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• v.28 no.5
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• pp.668-671
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• 2006

In this letter, an adaptive scanning that improves intra coding efficiency in the H.264/AVC standard is proposed. The proposed adaptive scanning utilizes the prediction directions (modes) that include the horizontal and vertical edge information in a block. Depending on the prediction directions, the proposed method uses three scanning methods: zigzag scanning, horizontal scanning, and vertical scanning. In the proposed method, horizontal and vertical scanning are used in vertical and horizontal prediction modes, respectively, and the normal zigzag scanning in the H.264 standard is used in all other intra prediction modes. The proposed method reduces the bit rate by approximately 2.5% compared with H.264/AVC, without the degradation of video quality.

• Journal of Broadcast Engineering
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• v.14 no.3
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• pp.271-279
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• 2009

The Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG) and Video Coding Experts Group (VCEG) have developed a new standard that promises to outperform the earlier MPEG-4 and H.263 standards. The new standard is called H.264/AVC (Advanced Video Coding) and is published jointly as MPEG-4 Part 10 and ITU-T Recommendation H.264. In particular, the H.264/AVC intra prediction coding provides nine directional prediction modes for every $4{\times}4$ block in order to reduce spatial redundancies. In this paper, an ABS (Adaptive Bit Skip) mode is proposed. In order to achieve coding efficiency, the proposed method can remove the mode bits to represent the prediction mode by using the similarity of adjacent pixels. Experimental results show that the proposed method achieves the PSNR gain of about 0.2 dB in R-D curve and reduces the bit rates about 3.6% compared with H.264/AVC.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SP
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• v.43 no.6 s.312
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• pp.97-104
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• 2006

The state-of-the-art H.264/AVC standard was designed for the lossy video coding so that it could not yield the best performance for lossless video coding. In this paper, we propose two efficient intra lossless coding methods by embedding a pixel-wise prediction into the H.264/AVC. One is based on the pixel-wise prediction for the residual signal of the H.264/AVC intra Prediction and the other suggests a newly additional intra prediction mode for the conventional intra prediction. We found that the proposed lossless coding algorithms could achieve approximately $12%{\sim}25%$ more bit saving compared to the H.264/AVC FRExt high profile for several test sequences in terms of a compression ratio.

• The Journal of Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences
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• v.30 no.12C
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• pp.1144-1152
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• 2005

Intra prediction coding is one of the many coding-efficiency oriented tools of H.264/AVC, but it requires high computational complexity. Many fast intra coding algorithms have been proposed to reduce the computational complexity of intra prediction. While most of them have been focused on the mode decision methods themselves, we propose a fast algorithm in which new intra modes are substituted for the conventional intra modes so that the number of intra modes can be reduced. The simulation results show that the proposed method could reduce the encoding time of the overall sequence by $49\%$ without any noticeable degradation of the coding efficiency.

• ETRI Journal
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• v.27 no.5
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• pp.511-524
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• 2005

In this paper, we propose a novel hardware architecture for an intra-prediction, integer transform, quantization, inverse integer transform, inverse quantization, and mode decision module for the macroblock engine of a new video coding standard, H.264. To reduce the cycle of intra prediction, transform/quantization, and inverse quantization/inverse transform of H.264, a reduction method for cycle overhead in the case of I16MB mode is proposed. This method can process one macroblock for 927 cycles for all cases of macroblock type by processing $4{\times}4$ Hadamard transform and quantization during $16{\times}16$ prediction. This module was designed using Verilog Hardware Description Language (HDL) and operates with a 54 MHz clock using the Hynix $0.35 {\mu}m$ TLM (triple layer metal) library.

• 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.

• Journal of Broadcast Engineering
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• v.19 no.6
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• pp.836-846
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• 2014

To expedite UHD (Ultra High Definition) video service, the HEVC (High-Efficiency Video Coding) technology has recently been standardized and it achieves two times higher compression efficiency than the conventional H.264/AVC. To obtain the improved efficiency, however, it employs many complex methods which need complicated calculation, thereby resulting in a significantly increased computational complexity when compared to that of H.264/AVC. For example, to improve the coding efficiency of intra frame coding, up to 35 intra prediction modes are defined in HEVC, but this results in an increased encoding time than the H.264/AVC. In this paper, we propose a fast intra prediction mode decision scheme which reduces computational complexity by changing the number of intra prediction mode in accordance with the percentage of PU sizes for a given video resolution, and by classifying the 35 intra prediction modes into 4 categories considering video resolution and quantization parameter. The experimental results show that the total encoding time is reduced by about 7% on average at the cost of only 2% increase in BD-rate.

• Journal of Broadcast Engineering
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• v.14 no.5
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• pp.589-600
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• 2009

This paper is ready to change a trend of a ultra high definition (UHD) video image, and it will contribute to improve the performance of the latest H.264 through the Uni-directional $8{\times}8$ intra-prediction idea which is based on developing a intra prediction compression. The Uni-directional $8{\times}8$ intra prediction is focused on a $8{\times}8$ block intra prediction using $4{\times}4$ block based prediction which is using the same direction of intra prediction. This paper describes that the uni-directional $8{\times}8$ intra-prediction gets a improvement around 7.3% BDBR only in the $8{\times}8$ block size, and it gets a improvement around 1.3% BDBR in the H.264 applied to the multi block size structures. In the case of a larger image size, it can be changed to a good algorithm. Because the video codec which is optimized for UHD resolution can be used a different block size which is bigger than before(currently a minimum of $4{\times}4$ blocks of units).

• 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.