• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.6 no.4
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• pp.1128-1139
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• 2012

With the development of three-dimensional display and related technologies, depth video coding becomes a new topic and attracts great attention from industries and research institutes. Because (1) the depth video is not a sequence of images for final viewing by end users but an aid for rendering, and (2) depth video is simpler than the corresponding color video, fast algorithm for depth video is necessary and possible to reduce the computational burden of the encoder. This paper proposes a fast mode decision algorithm for depth video coding based on depth segmentation. Firstly, based on depth perception, the depth video is segmented into three regions: edge, foreground and background. Then, different mode candidates are searched to decide the encoding macroblock mode. Finally, encoding time, bit rate and video quality of virtual view of the proposed algorithm are tested. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm save encoding time ranging from 82.49% to 93.21% with negligible quality degradation of rendered virtual view image and bit rate increment.

• Journal of Korea Multimedia Society
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• v.18 no.2
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• pp.149-157
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• 2015

The 3D-AVC standard aims at improving coding efficiency by applying new techniques for utilizing intra, inter and view predictions. 3D video scenes are rendered with existing texture video and additional depth map. The depth map comes at the expense of increased computational complexity of the encoding process. For real-time applications, reducing the complexity of 3D-AVC is very important. In this paper, we present a fast intra mode decision algorithm to reduce the complexity burden in the 3D video system. The proposed algorithm uses similarity between texture video and depth map. The best intra prediction mode of the depth map is similar to that of the corresponding texture video. The early decision algorithm can be made on the intra prediction of depth map coding by using the coded intra mode of texture video. Adaptive threshold for early termination is also proposed. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm saves the encoding time on average 29.7% without any significant loss in terms of the bit rate or PSNR value.

• Journal of Information Processing Systems
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• v.18 no.2
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• pp.235-244
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• 2022

Many new techniques have been adopted in HEVC (High efficiency video coding) standard, such as quadtree-structured coding unit (CU), prediction unit (PU) partition, 35 intra-mode, and so on. To reduce computational complexity, the paper proposes two optimization algorithms which include fast CU depth range decision and fast PU partition mode decision. Firstly, depth range of CU is predicted according to spatial-temporal correlation. Secondly, we utilize the depth difference between the current CU and CU corresponding to the same position of adjacent frame for PU mode range selection. The number of traversal candidate modes is reduced. The experiment result shows the proposed algorithm obtains a lot of time reducing, and the loss of coding efficiency is inappreciable.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics and Information Engineers
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• v.53 no.2
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• pp.89-96
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• 2016

The High Efficiency Video Coding (MPEG-H HEVC/ITU-T H.265) is the newest video coding standard which has the quadtree-structured coding unit (CU). The quadtree-structure splits a CU adaptively, and its optimum CU depth can be determined by rate-distortion optimization. Such HEVC encoding requires very high computational complexity for CU depth decision. Motivated that the blob detection, which is a well-known algorithm in computer vision, detects keypoints in pictures and decision of CU depth needs to consider high frequency energy distribution, in this paper, we propose to utilize these keypoints for fast CU depth decision. Experimental results show that 20% encoding time can be saved with only slightly increasing BDBR by 0.45% on all intra case.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.12 no.4
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• pp.1730-1747
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• 2018

Multi-view video plus depth (MVD) is a mainstream format of 3D scene representation in free viewpoint video systems. The advanced 3D extension of the high efficiency video coding (3D-HEVC) standard introduces new prediction tools to improve the coding performance of depth video. However, the depth video in 3D-HEVC is time consuming. To reduce the complexity of the depth video inter coding, we propose a fast coding unit (CU) size and mode decision algorithm. First, an off-line trained Bayesian model is built which the feature vector contains the depth levels of the corresponding spatial, temporal, and inter-component (texture-depth) neighboring largest CUs (LCUs). Then, the model is used to predict the depth level of the current LCU, and terminate the CU recursive splitting process. Finally, the CU mode search process is early terminated by making use of the mode correlation of spatial, inter-component (texture-depth), and inter-view neighboring CUs. Compared to the 3D-HEVC reference software HTM-10.0, the proposed algorithm reduces the encoding time of depth video and the total encoding time by 65.03% and 41.04% on average, respectively, with negligible quality degradation of the synthesized virtual view.

• Journal of Broadcast Engineering
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• v.22 no.5
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• pp.541-547
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• 2017

The Joint Exploration Model (JEM), which is a reference SW codec of the Joint Video Exploration Team (JVET) exploring the future video standard technology, provides a recursive Quadtree plus Binary Tree (QTBT) block structure. QTBT can achieve enhanced coding efficiency by adding new block structures at the expense of largely increased computational complexity. In this paper, we propose a fast decision algorithm of QTBT block partitioning depth that uses the rate-distortion (RD) cost of the upper and current depth to reduce the complexity of the JEM encoder. Experimental results showed that the computational complexity of JEM 5.0 can be reduced up to 21.6% and 11.0% with BD-rate increase of 0.7% and 1.2% in AI (All Intra) and RA (Random Access), respectively.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.13 no.6
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• pp.3165-3181
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• 2019

Spherical videos, which are also called 360-degree videos, have become increasingly popular due to the rapid development of virtual reality technology. However, the large amount of data in such videos is a huge challenge for existing transmission system. To use the existing encode framework, it should be converted into a 2D image plane by using a specific projection format, e.g. the equi-rectangular projection (ERP) format. The existing high-efficiency video coding standard (HEVC) can effectively compress video content, but its enormous computational complexity makes the time spent on compressing high-frame-rate and high-resolution 360-degree videos disproportionate to the benefits of compression. Focusing on the ERP format characteristics of 360-degree videos, this work develops a fast decision algorithm for predicting the coding unit depth interval and adaptive mode decision for intra prediction mode. The algorithm makes full use of the video characteristics of the ERP format by dealing with pole and equatorial areas separately. It sets different reference blocks and determination conditions according to the degree of stretching, which can reduce the coding time while ensuring the quality. Compared with the original reference software HM-16.16, the proposed algorithm can reduce time consumption by 39.3% in the all-intra configuration, and the BD-rate increases by only 0.84%.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.9 no.6
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• pp.2271-2288
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• 2015

The emerging high efficiency video coding (HEVC) standard adopts the quadtree-structured transform unit (TU) in the residual quadtree (RQT) coding. Each TU allows to be split into four equal sub-TUs recursively. The RQT coding is performed for all the possible transform depth levels to achieve the highest coding efficiency, but it requires a very high computational complexity for HEVC encoders. In order to reduce the computational complexity requested by the RQT coding, in this paper, we propose a fast TU size decision method incorporating an adaptive maximum transform depth determination (AMTD) algorithm and a full check skipping - early termination (FCS-ET) algorithm. Because the optimal transform depth level is highly content-dependent, it is not necessary to perform the RQT coding at all transform depth levels. By the AMTD algorithm, the maximum transform depth level is determined for current treeblock to skip those transform depth levels rarely used by its spatially adjacent treeblocks. Additionally, the FCS-ET algorithm is introduced to exploit the correlations of transform depth level between four sub-CUs generated by one coding unit (CU) quadtree partitioning. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed overall algorithm significantly reduces on average 21% computational complexity while maintaining almost the same rate distortion (RD) performance as the HEVC test model reference software, HM 13.0.

• 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.5 no.4
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• pp.231-234
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• 2016

The next-generation video coding standard known as High-Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) was developed with the aim of doubling the bitrate reduction offered by H.264/Advanced Video Coding (AVC) at the expense of an increase in computational complexity. Mode decision with motion estimation is still one of the most time-consuming computations in HEVC, as it is with H.264/AVC. Several schemes for a fast mode decision have been presented in reference software and in other studies. However, a possible speed-up in conventional schemes is sometimes insignificant for videos that have inhomogeneous spatial and temporal characteristics. This paper proposes a bypass algorithm to skip large-block-size predictions for videos where small block sizes are preferred over large ones. The proposed algorithm does not overlap with those in previous works, and thus, is easily used with other fast algorithms. Consequently, an independent speed-up is possible.