• Journal of Korea Multimedia Society
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• v.15 no.4
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• pp.485-491
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• 2012

This paper proposes 'Coding Unit Tree' based on quadtree efficiently with motion vector to represent splitting information of a Coding Unit (CU) in HEVC. The new international video coding, High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC), adopts various techniques and new unit concept: CU, Prediction Unit (PU), and Transform Unit (TU). The basic coding unit, CU is larger than macroblock of H.264/AVC and it splits to process image-based quadtree with a hierarchical structure. However, in case that there are complex motions in CU, the more signaling bits with motion information need to be transmitted. This structure provides a flexibility and a base for a optimization, but there are overhead about splitting information. This paper analyzes those signals and proposes a new algorithm which removes those redundancy. The proposed algorithm utilizes a type code, a dominant value, and residue values at a node in quadtree to remove the addition bits. Type code represents a structure of an image tree and the two values represent a node value. The results show that the proposed algorithm gains 13.6% bit-rate reduction over the HM-1.0.

• Journal of Broadcast Engineering
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• v.17 no.2
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• pp.354-362
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• 2012

Recently, High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) is under development jointly by MPEG and ITU-T for the next international video coding standard. Compared to the previous standards, HEVC supports variety of splitting units, such as coding unit (CU), prediction unit (PU), and transform unit (TU). Among them, it has been known that the recursive quadtree structure of CU can improve the coding efficiency while the encoding complexity is increased significantly. In this paper, a simple conditional probability to predict the early termination condition of recursive unit structure is introduced. The proposed conditional probability is estimated based on Bayes' formula from local statistics of rate-distortion costs in encoder. Experimental results show that the proposed method can reduce the total encoding time by about 32% according to the test configuration while the coding efficiency loss is 0.4%-0.5%. In addition, the encoding time can be reduced by 50% with 0.9% coding efficiency loss when the proposed method was used jointly with HM4.0 early CU termination algorithm.

• Journal of Broadcast Engineering
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• v.19 no.5
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• pp.627-630
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• 2014

The latest video coding standard, high efficiency video coding (HEVC) achieves high coding efficiency by employing a quadtree-based coding unit (CU) block partitioning structure which allows recursive splitting into four equally sized blocks. At each depth level, each CU is partitioned into variable sized blocks of prediction units (PUs). However, the determination of the best CU partition for each coding tree unit (CTU) and the best PU mode for each CU causes a dramatic increase in computational complexity. To reduce such computational complexity, we propose a fast PU decision algorithm that early terminates PU search. The proposed method skips the computation of R-D cost for certain PU modes in the current CU based on the best mode and the rate-distortion (RD) cost of the upper depth CU. Experimental results show that the proposed method reduces the computational complexity of HM12.0 to 18.1% with only 0.2% increases in BD-rate.

• Journal of Broadcast Engineering
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• v.17 no.5
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• pp.765-780
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• 2012

In this paper, we propose a fast mode decision method that determines the coding unit depth for enhancement layers to improve an encoding speed of a scalable video encoder based on HEVC. To decide the coding unit depth of the enhancement layer, firstly, the coding unit depth of the corresponded coding unit in the basement layer is employed. At this stage, the final CU depth is decided by calculating the rate-distortion costs of one lower depth to one upper depth of the referenced depth. The proposed method can reduce a computational load since it does not calculate the rate-distortion costs for all the depths of a target CU. We found that the proposed algorithm decreases encoding complexity of 26% with approximately 1.4% bit increment, compared with the simulcast encoder of the HM 4.0.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics and Information Engineers
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• v.53 no.11
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• pp.41-47
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• 2016

High efficiency video coding (HEVC) employs a coding tree unit (CTU) to improve the coding efficiency. A CTU consists of coding units (CU), prediction units (PU), and transform units (TU). All possible block partitions should be performed on each depth level to obtain the best combination of CUs, PUs, and TUs. To reduce the complexity of block partitioning process, this paper proposes the PU mode skip algorithm with region of interest (RoI) selection using motion vector. In addition, this paper presents the CU depth level skip algorithm using the co-located block information in the previously encoded frames. First, the RoI selection algorithm distinguishes between dynamic CTUs and static CTUs and then, asymmetric motion partitioning (AMP) blocks are skipped in the static CTUs. Second, the depth level skip algorithm predicts the most probable target depth level from average depth in one CTU. The experimental results show that the proposed fast CU decision algorithm can reduce the total encoding time up to 44.8% compared to the HEVC test model (HM) 14.0 reference software encoder. Moreover, the proposed algorithm shows only 2.5% Bjontegaard delta bit rate (BDBR) loss.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society of Broadcast Engineers Conference
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• 2013.11a
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• pp.172-173
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• 2013

최근 표준화가 완료된 HEVO(High Efficiency Video Coding)에서는 계층적 구조를 갖는 가변블록의 크기를 사용하고 재귀적으로 부호화를 수행사여, 최적의 부호화단위(CU: Coding Unit) 분할 구조와 예측단위(PU: Prediction Unit)를 결정함으로써 높은 부호화 효율을 얻을 수 있는 반면 부호화 복잡도가 증가하는 문제가 있다. 본 논문에서는 부호화기의 복잡도를 감소시키기 위한 고속 부호화 알고리즘으로 고속 모드 결정 기법을 제안한다. 제안기법은 상위 깊이(CU: Coding Unit)의 최적 모드와 부호화 율-왜곡 비용을 이용해서 현재 깊이 CU에서의 특정 모드의 율-왜곡 비용 계산을 생략함으로써 PU 탐색을 조기 종료한다. 즉, 상위 깊이 CU의 조건에 따라 화면간 예측 모드의 일부 또는 화면내 예측을 수행하지 않는다. 실험결과 제안기법은 HM 12.0대비 0.2%의 비트 증가에 22.9%의 계산시간 감소 효과를 얻을 수 있음을 확인하였다.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society of Broadcast Engineers Conference
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• 2011.11a
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• pp.42-45
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• 2011

최근ISO/IEC와 ITU는 공동 협력팀(Joint Collaborative Team on Video Coding-JCT-VC)을 구성하여 HEVC(High Efficiency Video Coding)라 불리는 새로운 비디오 압축 표준 기술을 개발하고 있다. JCT-VC의 목표 중 하나는 H.264/AVC 압축률의 2배를 향상하는 것으로 최근 HEVC 테스트 모델(HEVC Test Model - HM)을 확정했다. HM의 여러 기술 중에서 확장 블록 구조 (large block structure) 기술은 CU(Coding Unit)와 TU(Transform Unit), PU(Partition Unit)로 구성된다. CU와 TU는 압축 단위와 변환 기술을 확장한 반복적인 문법구조(recursive syntax structure)이며, PU는 H.264/AVC과 동일한 형태를 띈다. 확장 블록 구조는 CU, PU, TU의 여러 조합에 의해 다양한 모드를 지원하여 압축 성능은 높아졌지만 HM 부호화기의 복잡도는 증가한다. 본 논문에서는 HM에 채택된 확장 블록 구조 기술에 대해 설명한 후, 계층적 B프레임 구조로 부호화 되는 경우 이전 레벨의 CU Depth 정보를 이용하여 현재 레벨의 CU Depth를 효과적으로 제한하여 기존의 방법보다 빠르게 부호화하는 방법을 제안한다.

• Journal of Broadcast Engineering
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• v.17 no.5
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• pp.716-724
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• 2012

In this paper, we propose a fast decision method of maximum coding depth decision and reference frame selection in HEVC. To reduce computational complexity and encoding time of HEVC, two methods are proposed. In the first method, the maximum depth of each coding unit (CU) in a largest CU (LCU) is constrained by using the maximum coding depth used by adjacent LCUs based on the assumption that the spatial correlation is very high and rate-distortion (R-D) cost. And we constrain the number of reference pictures for prediction unit (PU) performing motion estimation by using the motion information of the upper depth PU. The proposed methods reduce computational complexity of the HEVC encoder by constraining the maximum coding depth and the reference frame. We could achieve about 39% computational complexity reduction with marginal bitrate increase of 1.2% in the comparison with HM6.1 HEVC reference software.

• IEIE Transactions on Smart Processing and Computing
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• v.1 no.3
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• pp.171-181
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• 2012

In the new video coding standard, called high efficiency video coding (HEVC), the coding unit (CU) is adopted as a basic unit of a coded block structure. Therefore, the rate control (RC) methods of H.264/AVC, whose basic unit is a macroblock, cannot be applied directly to HEVC. This paper proposes the largest CU (LCU) level RC method for hierarchical video coding in a HEVC. In the proposed method, the effective bit allocation is performed first based on the hierarchical structure, and the quantization parameters (QP) are then determined using the Cauchy density based rate-quantization (RQ) model. A novel method based on the linear rate model is introduced to estimate the parameters of the Cauchy density based RQ model precisely. The experimental results show that the proposed RC method not only controls the bitrate accurately, but also generates a constant number of bits per second with less degradation of the decoded picture quality than with the fixed QP coding and latest RC method for HEVC.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society of Broadcast Engineers Conference
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• 2011.07a
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• pp.173-176
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• 2011

현재 표준화가 진행 중인 HEVC (High-efficiency video coding) 는 기존의 동영상 표준과 마찬가지로 여러 기술들이 혼합된 하이브리드 영상 부호화 프레임 워크 구조를 따르고 있다. 특히, 다양한 크기의 부호화 단위 (Coding Unit : CU), 예측단위 (Prediction Unit : PU), 변환 단위 (Transform Unit : TU) 의 사용으로 인해 HD 이상의 영상에 대하여 기존의 H.264/AVC 보다 약 40%의 압축률 향상을 보이고 있다. 하지만 그로 인하여 부호화기 복잡도가 약 3 배 이상 증가하는 것으로 나타났으며 이는 실시간 부호화가 요구되는 분야에서 큰 문제가 될 것이다. 본 논문은 HEVC 부호화기 복잡도를 낮추기 위하여 최적의 CU 를 결정하는 과정 중 조기에 CU 를 결정하는 고속 CU 결정 방법을 소개한다. 실험 결과, 제안된 방법은 HM과 비교하여 PSNR (Peak Signal to Noise Ratio) 의 손실이 거의 없이 최대 약 58%의 부호화 시간을 절약하였다.