• Proceedings of the IEEK Conference
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• 2006.06a
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• pp.411-412
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• 2006

In this paper, we proposed a fast algorithm for inter prediction included the most complexity in H.264/AVC. It decide search range according to direction of predicted motion vector, and then perform adaptive candidate spiral search. Simultaneously, it perform motion estimation of variable loop with threshold for variable block size. Conclusively, it is implemented in JM FME with high complexity applying to rate-distortion optimization. Experimental results show that significant complexity reduction is achieved while the degradation in video quality is negligible.

• Journal of Korea Multimedia Society
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• v.11 no.7
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• pp.956-965
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• 2008

H.264/AVC is the newest video coding standard of ITU-T VCEG and the ISO/IEC MPEG, offering a significant performance improvement over previous video coding standards. However, the computational complexity of H.264/AVC is drastically increased because of new technologies such as intra prediction, variable block size, quarter-pels motion estimation/compensation, etc. In this paper, we propose a fast intra prediction scheme which has two step processing. The first step is a fast block size decision which can be calculated only in one block without considering all cases of $4{\times}4$ block and $16{\times}16$ block. The complexity of the intra prediction can be reduced by using boundary difference values of macroblock. After selecting the block size, we can make mode decision using the neighbouring reference pixels and representative pixels of the block in the second step. The experimental results show that the proposed algorithm saved on the average 41.5% encoding time without any significant PSNR losses.

• Environmental and Resource Economics Review
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• v.23 no.3
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• pp.409-434
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• 2014

This paper estimates household demand for electricity using a micro-level household expenditure data set. A two-stage estimation method where the endogenous block price estimates are obtained from a discrete block choice model is used. This method successfully identifies a downward sloping conditional demand function with the data, while both the usual two-stage method with instrumental variable estimation and the Hewitt-Hanemann discrete-continuous model fail to do that. The paper simulates the impacts of two hypothetical pricing reforms that reduce the number of blocks and make the price gap smaller. It is shown that the reform may increase the overall consumer benefit, but is regressive.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information and Communication Engineering
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• v.18 no.5
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• pp.1187-1193
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• 2014

This paper presents an effective motion estimation to improve the performance of the motion compensated temporal filtering (MCTF) which is a core part of the wavelet-based scalable video coding. The proposed scheme makes the motion vector field uniform by the modified median operation and the search strategies using adjacent motion vectors, in order to enhance the pixel connectivity which is significantly relevant to the performance of the MCTF. Moreover, the motion estimation with variable block sizes that reflects the features of frames is introduced for further correlation improvement of the motion vector field. Experimental results illustrate that the proposed method reduces the decomposed energy on the temporal high frequency subband frame up to 30.33% in terms of variance compared to the case of the full search with fixed block sizes.

• The Journal of Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences
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• v.31 no.11C
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• pp.1077-1084
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• 2006

This paper proposed a fast algorithm to reduce the amount of calculation for inter prediction which takes a great deal of the operational time in H.264/AVC. This algorithm decides a search range according to the direction of predicted motion vector, and then performs an adaptive spiral search for the candidates with JM(Joint Model) FME(Fast Motion Estimation) which employs the rate-distortion optimization(RDO) method. Simultaneously, it decides a threshold cost value for each of the variable block sizes and performs the motion estimation for the variable search ranges with the threshold. These activities reduce the great amount of the complexity in inter prediction encoding. Experimental results by applying the proposed method .to various video sequences showed that the process time was decreased up to 80% comparing to the previous prediction methods. The degradation of video quality was only from 0.05dB to 0.19dB and the compression ratio decreased as small as 0.58% in average. Therefore, we are sure that the proposed method is an efficient method for the fast inter prediction.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SD
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• v.44 no.5
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• pp.58-65
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• 2007

As multimedia portable devices become popular, the amount of computation for processing data including video compression has significantly increased. Various researches for low power consumption of the mobile devices and real time processing have been reported. Motion Estimation is responsible for 67% of H.264 encoder complexity. In this research, a new circuit is designed for motion estimation. The new circuit uses motion prediction based on approximate SAD, Alternative Row Scan (ARS), DAU, and FDVS algorithms. Our new method can reduce the amount of computation by 75% when compared to multi-frame motion estimation suggested in JM8.2. Furthermore, optimal number and size of reference frame blocks are determined to reduce computation without affecting the PSNR. The proposed Motion Estimation method has been verified by using the hardware and software Co-Simulation with iPROVE. It can process 30 CIF frames/sec at 50MHz.

• The Journal of Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences
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• v.33 no.10C
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• pp.820-828
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• 2008

In order to achieve high coding efficiency, H.264/AVC video coding standard adopts the techniques such as variable block size coding, motion estimation with quarter-pel precision, multiple reference frames, rate-distortion optimization, and etc. However, these coding methods have a defect to greatly increase the complexity for motion estimation. Particularly, from multiple reference frame motion estimation, the computational burden increases in proportion to the number of the searched reference frames. Therefore, we propose the method to reduce the complexity by controlling the number of the searched reference frames in motion estimation. Proposed algorithm uses the optimal reference frame information in both $P16{\times}16$ mode and the adjacent blocks, thus omits unnecessary searching process in the rest of inter modes. Experimental results show the proposed method can save an average of 57.31% of the coding time with negligible quality and bit-rate difference. This method also can be adopted with any of the existing motion estimation algorithm. Therefore, additional performance improvement can be obtained.

• The Journal of Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences
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• v.33 no.3C
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• pp.247-254
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• 2008

H.264 provides a good coding efficiency compared with existing video coding standards, H.263, MPEG-4, based on the use of multiple reference frame for variable block size motion estimation, quarter-pixel motion estimation and compensation, $4{\times}4$ integer DCT, rate-distortion optimization, and etc. However, many modules used to increase its performance also require H.264 to have increased complexity so that fast algorithms are to be implemented as practical approach. In this paper, among many approaches, fast mode decision algorithm by skipping variable block size motion estimation and spatial-predictive coding, which occupies most encoder complexity, is proposed. This approach takes advantages of temporal and spatial properties of fast mode selection techniques. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach can save encoding time up to 65% compared with the H.264 standard while maintaining the visual perspectives.

• Proceedings of the Korea Information Processing Society Conference
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• 2000.04a
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• pp.1112-1115
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• 2000

본 논문에서는 One-bit 변환을 기반으로 한 고속의 가변 블록 크기 움직임 예측 알고리즘을 제안한다. 제안된 방법은 블록 내의 평균값을 이용하여 8bit 화소값을 1bit로 변환한 후 움직임 예측을 수행한다. One-bit 변환을 통한 영상의 단순화는 움직임 추정의 계산적 부담을 감소시켜 빠른 탐색을 가능하게 한다. 그리고 블록 내의 움직임 정도를 미리 판별하여 이를 기반으로 한 적응적 탐색이 불필요한 탐색을 제거하고 움직임이 큰 블록에서는 정합과정을 심화시켜 보다 정확한 움직임 예측을 수행한다. 본 제안된 방식을 가지고 실험한 결과 한 프레임당 적은 수의 블록으로 고정된 크기의 블록을 가진 전역 탐색 블록 정합 알고리즘(full search block matching algorithm; FSBMA)보다 예측 에러를 적게 발생시켜 평균적으로 0.5dB 정도의 PSNR 개선을 가져왔다. 특히, 움직임이 많은 영상에서 뛰어난 효과를 나타냈다.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SD
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• v.47 no.12
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• pp.48-54
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• 2010

This paper presents a high-performance architecture of integer-pel motion estimation circuit for H.264 video CODEC. Full search algorithm guarantees the best results by examining all candidate blocks. However, the full search algorithm requires a huge amount of computation and data. Many fast search algorithms have been proposed to reduce the computational efforts. The disadvantage of these algorithms is that data access from or to memory is very irregular and data reuse is difficult. In this paper, we propose an efficient integer-pixel motion estimation algorithm and the circuit architecture to improve the processing speed and reduce the external memory bandwidth. The proposed circuit supports seven kinds of variable block sizes and generates 41 motion vectors. We described the proposed high-performance motion estimation circuit at R1L and verified its operation on FPGA board. The circuit synthesized by using l30nm CMOS standard cell library processes 139.8 1080HD ($1,920{\times}1,088$) image frames per second and supports up to H.264 level 5.1.