Opportunity
All the digital video encoding devices such as digital video recorder, digital camera, digital video cam, high-definition video system can use the invented fast algorithms to reduce the cost and power consumption of the products. The market is huge in both portable devices and home entrainment products.
Technology
To achieve the highest coding efficiency, H.264 uses rate distortion optimization technique to get the best coding result in terms of maximizing coding quality and minimizing bit rates. This means that the encoder has to code the video by exhaustively trying all the mode combinations including the different intra- and inter-prediction modes. Therefore, the complexity and computation load of video coding in H.264 increase drastically, compared with any other previous standards. To reduce the complexity of rate-distortion cost computation, this project proposes a fast bit rate estimation technique to avoid the entropy coding method during intra- and inter-mode decision of H.264/AVC. Experimental results demonstrate that the new rate estimation method reduces 47 % of total encoding time on using intra-modes only and saves about 34 % of total encoding time on using both inter- and intra-modes with negligible degradation of coding performance.
Advantages
- The developed rate estimation algorithm is simple. In this algorithm entropy coding is not necessary during mode decision process. The new algorithm reduces large computation especially for medium and high motion content and complex texture sequences. The rate-distortion performance of proposed method is very close with actual RD performance for all types of frames (i.e. I, P, B frames). The total encoding time of this method is not significantly varied with QP factors and types of video sequences. So, the proposed scheme is very effective for real time implementation.
Applications
- To reduce the encoding complexity and computational requirements for selecting the best coding mode in H.264/AVC standards.
