• The Transactions of The Korean Institute of Electrical Engineers
• /
• v.61 no.8
• /
• pp.1199-1203
• /
• 2012

H.264 adopted many compression tools to increase image data compression efficiency such as B frame bi-directional predictions, the direct mode coding and so on. Despite its high compression efficiency, H.264 can suffer from its long coding time due to the complicated tools of H.264. To realize a high performance H.264, several fast algorithms were proposed. One of them is adaptive fast direct mode decision algorithm using mode and Lagrangian cost prediction for B frame in H.264/AVC (MLP) algorithm which can determine the direct coding mode for macroblocks without a complex mode decision process. However, in this algorithm, macroblocks not satisfying the conditions of the MLP algorithm are required to process the complex mode decision calculation, yet suffering a long coding time. To overcome the problem, this paper proposes a fast direct mode prediction algorithm. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm can determine the direct mode coding without a complex mode decision process for 42% more macroblocks and, this algorithm can reduce coding time by up to 23%, compared with Jin's algorithm. This enables to encode B frames fast with a less quality degradation.

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

• IEIE Transactions on Smart Processing and Computing
• /
• v.5 no.4
• /
• pp.235-242
• /
• 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 Journal of the Korea Contents Association
• /
• v.14 no.9
• /
• pp.102-109
• /
• 2014

Intra prediction in HEVC is also significantly improved from H.264/AVC with the increased prediction modes up to 35 that results in increase of the complexity cost. Hence, a fast intra mode decision algorithm is required for real-time applications. A fast intra mode decision is proposed in this paper for further complexity reduction in addition to the RMD (Rough Mode Decision) that has been adopted into the HEVC reference software, referred to as HM, for fast intra prediction. The proposed method reduces the complexity of intra mode decision by limiting the number of search modes in both steps of RMD and the final mode decision. Experimental results show that the proposed method provide about 13.2% encoding time reduction with 1.0% BD-rate increase on average over test sequences in HM 12.0.

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

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

• Proceedings of the Korean Society of Broadcast Engineers Conference
• /
• 2009.01a
• /
• pp.142-147
• /
• 2009

The recent H.264/AVC video coding standard provides a higher coding efficiency than previous standards. H.264/AVC achieves a bit rate saving of more than 50 % with many new technologies, but it is computationally complex. Most of fast mode decision algorithms have focused on Baseline profile of H.264/AVC. In this paper, a fast block mode decision scheme for P- slices in High profile is proposed to reduce the computational complexity for H.264/AVC because the High profile is useful for broadcasting and storage applications. To reduce the block mode decision complexity in P- pictures of High profile, we use the SAD value after $16{\times}16$ block motion estimation. This SAD value is used for the classification feature to divide all block modes into some proper candidate block modes. The proposed algorithm shows average speed-up factors of 47.42 ${\sim}$ 67.04% for IPPP sequences.

• Journal of Information Processing Systems
• /
• v.8 no.4
• /
• pp.685-692
• /
• 2012

B frame bi-directional predictions and the DIRECT mode coding of the H.264 video compression standard necessitate a complex mode decision process, resulting in a long computation time. To make H.264 feasible, this paper proposes an image backtrack-based fast (IBFD) algorithm and evaluates the performances of two promising fast algorithms (i.e., AFDM and IBFD). Evaluation results show that an image backtrack-based fast (IBFD) algorithm can determine DIRECT mode macroblocks with 13% higher accuracy, as compared with the AFDM. Furthermore, IBFD is shown to reduce the motion estimation time of B frames by up to 23% with a negligible quality degradation.

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

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
• /
• v.9 no.3
• /
• pp.20-27
• /
• 2009

H.264/AVC video coding standard adapting a rate-distortion optimization technique to select the best coding mode with multi reference frames for each macroblock gets a higher coding efficiency than those of previous video coding standards but the computational complexity increases drastically. Therefore, many fast mode decision algorithms are proposed to reduce the computational complexity. Among them, we propose a fast intra mode decision algorithm based on directional information of I4MB. The proposed algorithm achieves consistent time saving about 15% in IPPP sequences and 44% in all I frame sequences with negligible loss in PSNR and small increment of bit rate compared with that of JM11.0.