• 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.

• Journal of Broadcast Engineering
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• v.7 no.4
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• pp.300-309
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• 2002

The object of this paper is to make temporal direct mode clear by providing a solution to the following problem : if the co-located block in the list 1 reference picture for direct mode has only the 1ist 1 motion vector or both the 1ist 0 and list 1 motion vectors, then which motion vector will be used for the direct mode motion vector calculation\ulcorner This paper also shows how to derive reference picture index and direct mode motion vector for each list in order to guarantee the high coding efficiency. when the co-located macroblock is in intra mode. Furthermore, the reasonable calculation methods for the direct mode motion vectors in the various cases are presented. Finally, experimental results show that the proposed temporal direct mode provides the comparable performance against the spatial direct mode. Therefore, the simulation proves that the proposed temporal direct mode is acceptable.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.9 no.9
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• pp.1-8
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• 2009

H.264/AVC video coding standard uses the rate distortion optimization method which determines the best coding mode for macroblock(MB) to improve coding efficiency. Whereas RDO selects the best coding mode, it causes the heavy computational burden comparing with previous standards. To reduce the complexity, in this paper, a fast intra prediction mode decision algorithm using directional gradients is proposed. The proposed algorithm is composed of 2-path structure. In the first path, $16{\times}16$ intra prediction mode is determined using directional gradients. In the second path, 3 modes instead of 9 modes are chosen for RDO to decide the best mode for $4{\times}4$ block. Finally, the two modes determined in the two-path decision process are compared to decide the final block mode. Experimental results show that the computation time of the proposed method is decreased to about 77% of the exhaustive mode decision method with negligible quality loss.

• The Journal of Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences
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• v.32 no.3C
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• pp.269-277
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• 2007

In this paper, we present a efficient transcoding method from MPEG-2 to H.264. The proposed transcoder is the transcoding method for spatial domain which consists of MPEG-2 decoder part and H.264 encoding part. In transcoder, we can get useful information to estimate less probable modes from MPEG-2 decoder. Using this information, H.264 encoder chooses the macroblock mode of I-frame and P-frame adaptively to reduce the whole complexity of the transcoder. Our experimental result shows that the proposed algorithm can archive about $30\sim60%$ computational saving without significant degradation of visual quality and increasing of bit rate.

• Journal of Broadcast Engineering
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• v.9 no.3
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• pp.214-224
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• 2004

In this paper, an adaptive spatio-temporal predictive coding based on the H.264 is proposed for 3D immersive media encoding, such as 3D image processing, 3DTV, and 3D videoconferencing. First, we propose a spatio-temporal predictive coding using the same view and inter-view images for the two TPPP, IBBP GOP (group of picture) structures 4hat are different from the conventional simulcast method. Second, an 2D inter-view direct mode for the efficient prediction is proposed when the proposed spatio-temporal prediction uses the IBBP structure. The 2D inter-view direct mode is applied when the temporal direct mode in B(hi-Predictive) picture of the H.264 refers to an inter-view image, since the current temporal direct mode in the H.264 standard could no: be applied to the inter-view image. The proposed method is compared to the conventional simulcast method in terms of PSNR (peak signal to noise ratio) for the various 3D test video sequences. The proposed method shows better PSNR results than the conventional simulcast mode.

• Journal of Broadcast Engineering
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• v.13 no.1
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• pp.137-151
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• 2008

H.264/AVC is showed high coding efficiency more than previous video coding standard by using new coding tools. Specially, Variable block-based motion estimation and Rate-Distortion Optimization are very important coding tools in H.264/AVC. These coding tools have high coding efficiency, however the encoder complexity greatly increase due to these coding tools. In this paper, we propose early SKIP mode decision and selective inter/intra mode decision to reduce the computational complexity. Simulation results show that the proposed method could reduce encoding time of the overall sequences by 30% on average than JM 10.2 without noticeable degradation of coding efficiency. Besides, the proposed method runs over twice as fast as the previous proposed Fast Coding Mode Selection method (FCMS)[5].

• The Journal of Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences
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• v.33 no.11C
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• pp.925-931
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• 2008

In video coding standard H.264/AVC, variable block size mode algorithm improves compression efficiency but has need of a large amount of computation for various block modes and mode decision. Meanwhile, decided inter block modes depend on the complexity of a block image, and then the more complex a macroblock is, the smaller its block size is. This paper proposes fast inter block mode decision algorithm. It limits valid block modes to the block modes with a great chance for decision using the image complexity and carries out motion estimation rate-distortion optimization with only the valid block modes. In addition to that, it applies fast motion estimation PDE to the valid block modes with only the $16{\times}16$ block mode. The reference software JM 9.5 was executed to estimate the proposed algorithm's performance. The simulation results showed that the proposed algorithm could save about 24.12% of the averaged motion estimation time while keeping the image quality and the bit rate to be -0.02dB and -0.12% on the average, respectively.

• 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.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SP
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• v.44 no.3
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• pp.23-32
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• 2007

The H.264/AVC video coding standard uses rate distortion optimization (RDO) method to improve the compression performance in the intra prediction. The complexity and computational load are increased more than previous standard by using this method, even though this standard selects the best coding mode for the current macroblock. This paper proposes a fast intra mode decision algorithm for H.264/AVC encoder based on dominant edge direction (DED). To apply the idea, this algorithm uses the approximation of discrete cosine transform (DCT) coefficient. By detecting the DED, 3 modes instead of 9 modes are chosen for RDO calculation to decide the best mode in the $4{\times}4$ luma block. As for the $16{\times}16$ luma and $8{\times}8$ chroma block, instead of 4 modes, only 2 modes are searched. Experimental results show that the computation time of the proposed algorithm is decreased to about 72% of the full search method with negligible quality loss.

• Journal of Broadcast Engineering
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• v.12 no.5
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• pp.491-502
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• 2007

In this parer, we propose an efficient intra prediction mode decision scheme in Scalable Video Coding(SVC) which is an emerging video coding standard as an extension of H.264/MPEG-4 AVC(Advanced Video Coding). The proposed method in base on the characteristic of macroblock smoothness follows the statistical analysis of intra prediction mode in an enhancement layer and it decides a candidate intra prediction mode. We also propose an early termination scheme for Intra_BL mode decision where the RD cost value of Intra_BL is utilized. Simulation results show that the proposed method reduces 54.67% of the computation complexity of intra prediction coding, while the degradation in video quality is negligible; for low QP values, the average PSNR loss is very negligible, equivalently the bit rate increases by 0.011%. For high QP values, the average PSNR loss is less than 0.01dB, which equals to 0.249% increase in bitrate.