• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• 제10권3호
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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%.

• ETRI Journal
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• 제36권4호
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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.

• 한국방송∙미디어공학회:학술대회논문집
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• 한국방송공학회 2009년도 IWAIT
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• pp.142-147
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• 2009

The recent H.264/AVC video coding standard provides a higher coding efficiency than previous standards. H.264/AVC achieves a bit rate saving of more than 50 % with many new technologies, but it is computationally complex. Most of fast mode decision algorithms have focused on Baseline profile of H.264/AVC. In this paper, a fast block mode decision scheme for P- slices in High profile is proposed to reduce the computational complexity for H.264/AVC because the High profile is useful for broadcasting and storage applications. To reduce the block mode decision complexity in P- pictures of High profile, we use the SAD value after $16{\times}16$ block motion estimation. This SAD value is used for the classification feature to divide all block modes into some proper candidate block modes. The proposed algorithm shows average speed-up factors of 47.42 ${\sim}$ 67.04% for IPPP sequences.

• 대한전자공학회논문지SP
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• 제41권6호
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• pp.165-173
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• 2004

최근에 표준화가 완료된 H.264 비디오 부호화 표준은 기존 표준에 비해 높은 부호화 효율을 제공한다. H.264에는 움직임 보상 부호화를 위해 블록 크기에 따른 7가지 모드가 있으며, 인트라 부호화를 위해서는 인트라 예측 방향에 따라 다양한 모드를 지원한다. 이렇게 다양한 모드 중에서 가장 부호화 효율이 높은 모드를 결정하기 위하여, H.264 참조 모델은 복잡도가 높은 비트율-왜곡(Rate distortion) 최적화 기법을 채택하고 있다. 본 논문에서 제안한 '조기 SKIP 모드 결정법'과 '선택적 인트라 모드 생략법'은, 부호화 효율의 큰 감소 없이 H.264의 모드 결정에 소요되는 비트율-왜곡치(Rate distortion cost) 계산수를 평균 72% 감소 시켰으며, 전체 부호화 시간도 평균 30% 감소시켰다.

• 전자공학회논문지
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• 제51권3호
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• pp.139-143
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• 2014

This paper proposes a simplified DC calculation method for simplified depth coding (SDC) mode of 3D High Efficiency Video Coding (3D-HEVC) to reduce the computational complexity. For the computational complexity reduction, the current reference software of 3D-HEVC employs reference samples sub-sampling method. However, accumulation, branch, and division operations are still utilized and these operations increase computational complexity. The proposed method calculates DC value without those operations. The experimental results show that the proposed method achieves 0.1% coding gain for synthesized views in common test condition (CTC) with the significantly reduced number of computing operations.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• 제5권8호
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• pp.1444-1456
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• 2011

This paper presents a low-complexity algorithm for an H.264/AVC encoder. The proposed motion estimation scheme determines the best coding mode for a given macroblock (MB) by finding motion-blurred MBs; identifying, before motion estimation, an early selection of MBs; and hence saving processing time for these MBs. It has been observed that human vision is more sensitive to the movement of well-structured objects than to the movement of randomly structured objects. This study analyzed permissible perceptual distortions and assigned a larger inter-mode value to the regions that are perceptually less sensitive to human vision. Simulation results illustrate that the algorithm can reduce the computational complexity of motion estimation by up to 47.16% while maintaining high compression efficiency.

• 한국통신학회논문지
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• 제33권12C호
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• pp.1039-1045
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• 2008

H.264/AVC 비디오 부호화 표준은 높은 부호화 효율을 보여주지만, 그에 따른 부호기의 복잡도가 증가하는 단점이 있다. 특히 비트율-왜곡 최적화 기법을 이용하여 인트라 모드를 결정하는 방법은 부호기의 복잡도를 증가시키는 가장 큰 원인이다. 따라서 부호화 효율을 유지하면서 부호기의 복잡도를 감소시키는 여러 가지 방법이 제안되고 있다. 본 논문에서는 MPEG-2에서 H.264로의 변환 과정에서 $4{\times}4$ 정수 변환 계수를 이용하여 효율적으로 인트라 예측 모드를 결정하는 방법을 제안한다. 제안하는 알고리듬을 적용한 모의실험 결과는 영상의 부호화 성능을 유지하면서 복잡도 및 부호화 수행 시간을 감소시킬 수 있었다.

• ETRI Journal
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• 제35권2호
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• pp.270-280
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• 2013

A fast intra-prediction method is proposed for High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) using a fast intra-mode decision and fast coding unit (CU) size decision. HEVC supports very sophisticated intra modes and a recursive quadtree-based CU structure. To provide a high coding efficiency, the mode and CU size are selected in a rate-distortion optimized manner. This causes a high computational complexity in the encoder, and, for practical applications, the complexity should be significantly reduced. In this paper, among the many predefined modes, the intra-prediction mode is chosen without rate-distortion optimization processes, instead using the difference between the minimum and second minimum of the rate-distortion cost estimation based on the Hadamard transform. The experiment results show that the proposed method achieves a 49.04% reduction in the intra-prediction time and a 32.74% reduction in the total encoding time with a nearly similar coding performance to that of HEVC test model 2.1.

• Journal of information and communication convergence engineering
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• 제7권4호
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• pp.501-506
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• 2009

In the H.264/ AVC video coding standard, the intra-prediction coding with various block sizes offers a considerably high improvement in coding efficiency compared to previous standards. In order to achieve this, H.264/AVC uses the Rate-distortion optimization (RDO) technique to select the best intraprediction mode for a macroblock, and it brings about the drastic increase of the computation complexity of H.264 encoder. To reduce the computation complexity and stabilize the coding performance on visual quality, this paper proposed a fast intra-prediction mode decision algorithm using non-parametric thresholds and simplified directional masks. The use of nonparametric thresholds makes the intra-coding performance not be dependent on types of video sequences and simplified directional masks reduces the compuation loads needed by the calculation of local edge information. Experiment results show that the proposed algorithm is able to reduce more than 55% of the whole encoding time with a negligible loss in PSNR and bitrates and provides the stable performance regardless types of video sequences.

• Journal of Multimedia Information System
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• 제8권3호
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• pp.147-158
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• 2021

Versatile Video Coding (VVC) is the latest video coding standard developed by Joint Video Exploration Team (JVET). In VVC, the quadtree plus multi-type tree (QT+MTT) structure of coding unit (CU) partition is adopted, and its computational complexity is considerably high due to the brute-force search for recursive rate-distortion (RD) optimization. In this paper, we aim to reduce the time complexity of inter-picture prediction mode since the inter prediction accounts for a large portion of the total encoding time. The problem can be defined as classifying the split mode of each CU. To classify the split mode effectively, a novel convolutional neural network (CNN) called multi-level tree (MLT-CNN) architecture is introduced. For boosting classification performance, we utilize additional information including inter-picture information while training the CNN. The overall algorithm including the MLT-CNN inference process is implemented on VVC Test Model (VTM) 11.0. The CUs of size 128×128 can be the inputs of the CNN. The sequences are encoded at the random access (RA) configuration with five QP values {22, 27, 32, 37, 42}. The experimental results show that the proposed algorithm can reduce the computational complexity by 11.53% on average, and 26.14% for the maximum with an average 1.01% of the increase in Bjøntegaard delta bit rate (BDBR). Especially, the proposed method shows higher performance on the sequences of the A and B classes, reducing 9.81%~26.14% of encoding time with 0.95%~3.28% of the BDBR increase.