• Journal of Broadcast Engineering
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• v.17 no.3
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• pp.471-479
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• 2012

Intra prediction is one of the significant techniques in H.264/AVC reference software; however, it has heavy computational complexity. In order to solve this problem, many fast algorithms have been proposed. In this paper, we propose a fast intra mode decision algorithm which predicts the edge direction of the current block using sub-sampled pixels to reduce high computational complexity of the H.264/AVC encoder. The proposed algorithm shows that it not only improves the coding performance but also reduces the computational complexity of the H.264/AVC encoder compared to previous algorithms. The experimental results show that the proposed algorithm achieves the encoding time reduction of 75.93% on an average with slight peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) drop and bit-rate increment.

• The Journal of Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences
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• v.31 no.3C
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• pp.271-278
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• 2006

Rate-constrained coding is one of the many coding-efficiency oriented tools of H.264/AVC, but mode decision process of RDO(Rate distortion optimization) requires high computational complexity. Many fast mode decision algorithms have been proposed to reduce the computational complexity of mode decision. In this paper, we propose two algorithms for reduction of mode decision in H.264/AVC, which are the fast reference frame selection and selective intra prediction mode decision. Fast reference frame selection is efficient for inter predication and selective intra prediction mode decision can effectively reduce excessive calculation load of intra prediction mode decision. The simulation results showed that the proposed methods could reduce the encoding time of the overall sequences by 44.63% on average without any noticeable degradation of the coding efficiency.

• The Journal of Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences
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• v.33 no.12C
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• pp.1046-1054
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• 2008

Since the high quality digital TV systems are broadly deployed in the market, the digital video contents will be edited and distributed in MPEG-2 MP@HL fonnat. Due to its impressive coding efficiency, the H.264/AVC codec has rapidly replaced the MPEG-4 SP codec for mobile digital video terminal with low quality. For the bro ad distribution of digitial video contents produced in MPEG-2 format, the MPEG-2 to H.264/AVC transcoding is highly necessary nowadays. In this paper, we propose a fast intra MB prediction mode decision method to reduce the computational complexity in the transcoding, which is the main bottleneck in the transcoders. The proposed method is based on the several relationships such as DCT coefficients and edge orientation, correlation between prediction directions in the $Intra16{\times}16$ and $Intra4{\times}4$ modes, correlation between edge-orientations of luminance an d chrominance components. The simulation results show that the proposed method can reduce the computational complexity upto 70% and 40%, compared with the cascaded transcoder and the well-known fast intraframe transc oder, respectively.

• 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.

• Journal of Information Processing Systems
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• v.15 no.3
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• pp.492-499
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• 2019

HEVC is the high efficiency video coding standard, which provides better coding efficiency contrasted with the other video coding standard. But at the same time the computational complexity increases drastically. Thirty-five kinds of intra-prediction modes are defined in HEVC, while 9 kinds of intra prediction modes are defined in H.264/AVC. This paper proposes a fast rough mode decision (RMD) algorithm which adopts the smoothness of the up-reference pixels and the left-reference pixels to decrease the computational complexity. The three step search method is implemented in RMD process. The experimental results compared with HM13.0 indicate that the proposed algorithm can save 39.7% of the encoding time, while Bjontegaard delta bitrate (BDBR) is increased slightly by 1.35% and Bjontegaard delta peak signal-to-noise ratio (BDPSNR) loss is negligible.

• The Journal of Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences
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• v.30 no.12C
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• pp.1153-1161
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• 2005

The latest standard H.264 coding methods show better efficiency compared to the former coding standards from the rate distortion point of view, but also lead to high complexity. In this paper, we propose an adaptive and fast inter/intra prediction algorithm for H.264 video coding. In the inter prediction algorithm, an effective and simple mode selection method is proposed, which can adaptively adjust to motion estimation to reduce complexity. And proposed intra prediction algorithm reduces its complexity by using calculated Minimum Rate-Distortion costs in the prediction of Intra $16{\times}16$ and $4{\times}4$ modes. From experiment using JM8.4, our algorithm can reduce about $60.9\%$ of computation time as compared to JM, with only negligible PSNR and bitrate degradation.

• Journal of Broadcast Engineering
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• v.15 no.3
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• pp.380-390
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• 2010

The most recent standard video codec, H.264/AVC achieves significant coding efficiency by using a rate-distortion optimization(RDO). The RDO is a measurement for selecting the best mode which minimizes the Lagrangian cost among several modes. As a result, the computational complexity is increased drastically in encoder. In this paper, a method for fast intra prediction mode decision is proposed to reduce the RDO complexity. To speed up Intra$4{\times}4$ and Chroma Intra encoding, the proposed method decides the case that MPM (Most Probable Mode) is the best prediction mode. In this case, the RDO process is skipped, and only MPM is used for encoding the block in Intra$4{\times}4$. And the proposed method is also applied to the chroma Intra prediction mode in a similar way to the Intra$4{\times}4$. The experimental results show that the proposed method achieves an average encoding time saving of about 63% with negligible loss of PSNR (Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio).

• The Journal of Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences
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• v.32 no.6C
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• pp.585-593
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• 2007

For the improvement of coding efficiency, the H.264 standard uses new coding tools such as VBS, 1/4-pel accurate ME, multiple references, intra prediction, loop filter, etc. Using these coding tools, H.264 has achieved significant improvements from rate-distortion point of view compared to existing standards. However, the encoder complexity is greatly increased due to these coding tools. We focus on the complexity reduction method of intra-mode decision. Our algorithm first restricts selective prediction modes of Intra4x4 using a simple preprocessing. The prediction modes of Intra4x4 are used for restricting those of the other inter-modes. Simulation results show that the proposed method outperforms other conventional methods and save about 82% of total encoding time.

• Journal of Broadcast Engineering
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• v.20 no.2
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• pp.340-347
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• 2015

HEVC (High Efficiency Video Coding) achieves high coding efficiency by employing a quadtree-based coding unit (CU) block partitioning structure and various prediction units (PUs), and the determination of the best CU partition structure and the best PU mode based on rate-distortion (R-D) cost. However, the computation complexity of encoding also dramatically increases. In this paper, to reduce such encoding computational complexity, we propose three fast PU mode decision methods based on encoding information of upper depth as follows. In the first method, the search of PU mode of the current CU is early terminated based on the sub-CBF (Coded Block Flag) of upper depth. In the second method, the search of intra prediction modes of PU in the current CU is skipped based on the sub-Intra R-D cost of upper depth. In the last method, the search of intra prediction modes of PU in the lower depth's CUs is skipped based on the sub-CBF of the current depth's CU. Experimental results show that the three proposed methods reduce the computational complexity of HM 14.0 to 31.4%, 2.5%, and 23.4% with BD-rate increase of 1.2%, 0.11%, and 0.9%, respectively. The three methods can be applied in a combined way to be applied to both of inter prediction and intra prediction, which results in the complexity reduction of 34.2% with 1.9% BD-rate increase.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics and Information Engineers
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• v.51 no.10
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• pp.154-163
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• 2014

In this paper, there is suggested a fast intra prediction mode decision method in HEVC. To reduce the number of candidates in rough mode decision (RMD) process and rate-distortion optimization (RDO) process, the edge information and relative RMD cost are utilized. The experiment results show that the proposed method reduces encoding run-time by 26.81% with a negligible coding loss of 0.79% BD-rate on average.