• IEIE Transactions on Smart Processing and Computing
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• v.5 no.4
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• pp.235-242
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• 2016

The emerging High-Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) standard attempts to improve coding efficiency by a factor of two over H.264/Advanced Video Coding (AVC) at the expense of an increase in computational complexity. Mode decision with motion estimation (ME) is still one of the most time-consuming computations in HEVC, as it is with H.264/AVC. Thus, fast mode decisions are not only an important issue to be researched, but also an urgent one. Several schemes for fast mode decisions have been presented in reference software and in other studies. However, the conventional hierarchical mode decision can be useless when block-level parallelism is exploited. This paper proposes operation-level exploration that offers more chances for early termination. An early termination condition is checked between integer and fractional MEs and between the parts of one partition type. The fast decision points of the proposed algorithm do not overlap those in previous works. Thus, the proposed algorithms are easily used with other fast algorithms, and consequently, independent speed-up is possible.

• The Transactions of The Korean Institute of Electrical Engineers
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• v.56 no.10
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• pp.1868-1871
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• 2007

This paper proposes a novel scheme to significantly reduce mode decision time by predicting optimal mode candidates. Unlike previous fast mode decision algorithms computing RDcost in a pre-defined mode order, the proposed scheme predicts optimal mode candidates and calculates their RDcosts first, increasing the possibility to satisfy early-exit conditions sooner, resulting in fast mode decision. This H.264 mode decision time reduction enables small computing power mobile devices to handle H.264 encoding effectively. Extensive simulations show that, when compared with JM10.2, AMD and LCIMS, the proposed scheme boosts H.264 encoding speed by up to 575% with a reasonable image quality degradation.

• 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.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SP
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• v.43 no.6 s.312
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• pp.11-19
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• 2006

The recent video coding standard H.264 employs the rate-distortion optimization (RDO) method for choosing the best coding mode; however, it causes a large amount of encoding time. Thus, in order to reduce the encoding time, we need a fast mode decision algorithm. In this paper, we propose a fast inter mode decision algorithm considering quantization parameter (QP). The occurrence of best modes depends on QP. In order to reflect these characteristics, we consider the coded block pattern (CBP) which has 0 value when all quantized discrete cosine transform (DCT) coefficients are zero. We also use the early SKIP mode decision and early $16{\times}16$ mode decision methods. By computer simulations, we have verified that the proposed algorithm requires less encoding time than the fast inter mode decision method of the H.264 reference software for the Baseline and Main profiles by 19.6% and 18.8%, respectively.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SP
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• v.45 no.6
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• pp.95-107
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• 2008

In this paper, we propose a fast mode decision method for temporal and spatial scalability to reduce computational complexity of mode decision that used to be computationally one of the most intensive processes of the MPEG-4 AVC|H.264 SE(Scalable Extension) encoding. For temporal scalability, we propose an early skip method and MHM(mode history map) method. The early skip method confines macroblock modes of backward and forward frames within selected a few candidates. The MHM method utilizes stored information of frames inside a GOP of lower levels for the decision of MHM at higher level. For the spatial scalability, we propose the method that uses a candidate mode according to the MHM method and adds the BL_mode as candidates. The proposed scheme reduces the number of candidate modes to reduce computational complexity in mode decision. The proposed scheme reduces total encoding time by about 52% for temporal scalability and 47% for spatial scalability without significant loss of RD performance.

• 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 the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SP
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• v.41 no.6
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• pp.165-173
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• 2004

H.264 is the newest international video coding standard that provides high coding efficiency. A macroblock in H.264 has 7 different motion-compensation block sizes in the Inter mode, and several different prediction directions in the Intra mode. In order to achieve as highest coding efficiency as possible, H.264 reference model employs complex mode decision technique based on rate-distortion (RD) optimization which requires high computational complexity. In this paper, we propose two techniques -'early SKIP mode decision' and 'selective intra mode decision' - which can further reduce the computational complexity. Simulation results show that without considerable performance degradation, the proposed methods reduce encoding time by 30% on average and save the number of computing rate-distortion cost by 72%.

• 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.

• The Journal of Korea Institute of Information, Electronics, and Communication Technology
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• v.6 no.2
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• pp.71-75
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• 2013

Recently proliferating heterogeneous multimedia service environments should be able to deal with many different transmission speeds, image sizes, or qualities of video. However, not many existing video compression standards satisfy those necessities. To satisfy the functional requirements, the standardization of the H.264/AVC Scalable Extension (SE) technique has been recently completed. It is an extension of the H.264/AVC which can encode several image sizes and qualities at the same time as a single bitstream. To perform optimum mode decision, motion estimation is performed for all MB modes, and the RD costs are compared to identify an MB mode with the smallest RD cost. This increases computational complexity of H.264/AVC SE encoding. In this paper, we propose an early skip mode detection scheme to reduce candidate modes and suggest an algorithm of fast mode decision utilizing reference modes according to the mode history.

• ETRI Journal
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• v.32 no.4
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• pp.577-587
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• 2010

The layered coding structure of scalable video coding (SVC) with adaptive inter-layer prediction causes noticeable computational complexity increments when compared to existing video coding standards. To lighten the computational complexity of SVC, we present a fast algorithm to speed up the inter-mode decision process. The proposed algorithm terminates inter-mode decision early in the enhancement layers by estimating the rate-distortion (RD) cost from the macroblocks of the base layer and the enhancement layer in temporal, spatial, and inter-layer directions. Moreover, a search range decision algorithm is also proposed in this paper to further increase the motion estimation speed by using the motion vector information from temporal, spatial, or inter-layer domains. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm can determine the best mode and provide more efficient total coding time saving with very slight RD performance degradation for spatial and quality scalabilities.