• Journal of Broadcast Engineering
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• v.14 no.1
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• pp.28-35
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• 2009

H.264/AVC, a recently developed video compression standard, is used for various applications because of its high coding efficiency. Variable block mode plays important role in the high coding efficiency of H.264/AVC but involves significant computations to select the optimal mode. In this paper, a fast mode decision method for H.264/AVC P slices is presented. To reduce computations for mode decision, the proposed mode decision method skips the mode decision processes for small partition modes using distortions of SKIP mode and intra16x16 mode. The experimental results show that the proposed method can reduce encoding time up to 66.41% while maintaining compression efficiency.

• Journal of Broadcast Engineering
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• v.16 no.3
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• pp.448-461
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• 2011

H.264/AVC significantly outperforms the previous video coding standards with many new coding tools. Among these tools, several intra-block coding tools can particularly improve coding efficiency. For intra prediction, H.264/AVC supports most probable mode in the entropy coding process to reduce syntax elements indicating intra prediction modes and most probable mode selection ratio is very high. Also, in general, natural images and videos have many homogeneous regions whose high correlation with neighbouring blocks. In this paper, we propose intra prediction mode SKIP mode using decoder-side prediction to improve the coding efficiency. The proposed method is determined the optimal prediction mode using only neighbouring block's information and coded on the basis of the conventional prediction/transform coding. And the prediction modes are not send to decoder at all. Skipped intra prediction mode is determined by decoder. Experimental results show that the proposed method achieves coding gains of 1.40% for common intermediate format(CIF), 3.24% for 720p sequences against the H.264/AVC JM 17.0 reference software.

• Proceedings of the Korea Information Processing Society Conference
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• 2007.05a
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• pp.297-300
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• 2007

Due to its impressive compression performance, the H.264 video coder is highlighted in the video communications industry, such as DMB (Digital Multimedia Broadcasting), PMP (Portable Multimedia Player), etc. The main bottleneck to use the H.264 coder lays in the computational complexity, i.e. five times more complex than the market leading MPEG-4 Simple Profile codec. In this paper, we propose the hierarchical mode decision method for intraframe coding for the reduction of the computation complexity of the encoder. By determining the mode group early, the propose algorithm can skip the computationally demanding computation in the mode decision. The proposed algorithm is composed of three steps: $16{\times}16$ mode decision, $4{\times}4$ mode-group decisions, and final mode decision among the selected mode group. The simulation results show that the proposed algorithm achieves 20% to 50% reduction in the computational complexity compared with the conventional algorithm.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.8 no.3
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• pp.1093-1104
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• 2014

The High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) is a new video coding standard that can provide much better compression efficiency than its predecessor H.264/AVC. However, it is computationally more intensive due to the use of flexible quadtree coding unit structure and more choices of prediction modes. In this paper, a fast intraframe coding scheme is proposed for HEVC. Firstly, a fast bottom-up pruning algorithm is designed to skip the mode decision process or reduce the candidate modes at larger block size coding unit. Then, a low complexity rough mode decision process is adopted to choose a small candidate set, followed by early DC and Planar mode decision and mode filtering to further reduce the number of candidate modes. The proposed method is evaluated by the HEVC reference software HM8.2. Averaging over 5 classes of HEVC test sequences, 41.39% encoding time saving is achieved with only 0.77% bitrate increase.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SP
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• v.44 no.2 s.314
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• pp.1-11
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• 2007

H.264/AVC uses variable block sizes to achieve significant coding gain. It has 7 different coding modes having different motion compensation block sizes in Inter slice, and 2 different intra prediction modes in Intra slice. This fine-tuned new coding feature has achieved far more significant coding gain compared with previous video coding standards. However, extremely high computational complexity is required when rate-distortion optimization (RDO) algorithm is used. This computational complexity is a major problem in implementing real-time H.264/AVC encoder on computationally constrained devices. Therefore, there is a clear need for complexity reduction algorithm of H.264/AVC such as fast mode decision. In this paper, we propose a fast mode decision with early $P8\times8$ mode rejection based on block size activity using large block history map (LBHM). Simulation results show that without any meaningful degradation, the proposed method reduces whole encoding time on average by 53%. Also the hybrid usage of the proposed method and the early SKIP mode decision in H.264/AVC reference model reduces whole encoding time by 63% on average.

• Journal of Broadcast Engineering
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• v.10 no.1 s.26
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• pp.77-82
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• 2005

We propose a highly Integrated motion estimation processor (MEP) for efficient video compression in an SoC platform. When compressing video by the standards like MPEG-4 and H.263, the macroblock related functions motion compensation. mode decision, motion vector prediction, and motion vector difference calculation require the frequent intervention of MCU. Thus the proposed MEP incorporates those functions with the motion estimation capability to reduce the number of interrupts to MCU, which can lead to a highly efficient SoC system. For low-power consumption, the proposed MEP can prevent the temporally static area from motion estimation or can skip the half-pel motion estimation for those macroblocks whose modes are decided as INTRA.

• Proceedings of the Korea Information Processing Society Conference
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• 2008.11a
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• pp.86-89
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• 2008

본 논문에서는 H.264/AVC 비디오의 고속 부호화를 구현 하기 위하여 인터 프레임 상에서 움직임 벡터의 상관관계를 이용한 빠른 인트라 모드 스킵 알고리즘을 보인다. 제안한 인트라 모드 스킵은 이웃 블록 사이의 움직임 벡터간의 상관관계와 이전 프레임의 매크로블록(Macroblock)의 모드를 이용하여 인트라 예측을 생략함으로써 계산량을 줄이는 방법이다. 새로운 물체가 나타나거나 복잡한 움직임을 보이는 매크로블록들이 인트라 모드로 결정될 확률이 높기 때문에, 주변블록의 분산을 이용하여 임계값을 계산하고, 현재 매크로블록의 분산값과 비교하여 조건에 맞는 매크로블록에 대해 인트라 예측을 생략한다. 또한 시간적 상관관계가 높은 이전 프레임의 같은 위치의 매크로블록의 모드가 인트라 모드로 선택 되었을 경우, 인트라 예측을 실행한다. 제안한 방법으로 실험하였을 때, 기존의 논문과 비교하여 부호화 시간이 평균 26.02% 정도 감소하였다.

• Journal of Broadcast Engineering
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• v.12 no.6
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• pp.611-623
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• 2007

The H.264|AVC standard incorporates an intra prediction tool into inter frame coding. However, this leads to excessive amount of increase in encoding time, thus resulting in the difficulty in real-time implementation of software encoders. In this paper, we first propose an early decision on intra prediction coding and a fast intra prediction method using the characteristics of block contents and the context of neighboring block modes for the intra prediction in the inter frame coding of H.264/AVC. Basically, the proposed methods determine a skip condition on whether the $4{\times}4$ intra prediction is to be used in the inter frame coding by considering the content characteristics of each block to be encoded and the context of its neighboring blocks. The performance of our proposed methods is compared with the Joint Model reference software version 11.0 of H.264|AVC. The experimental results show that our proposed methods allow for 41.63% reduction in the total encoding time with negligible amounts of PSNR drops and bitrate increases, compared to the original Joint Model reference software version 11.0.