Fast Interframe mode decision algorithm based on mode mapping and MB activity for MPEG-2 to H.264/AVC transcoding

Recently the latest video coding standard H.264/AVC is widely used for the mobile and low bitrate video codec in the various multimedia terminals. On the other hand, the MPEG-2 MP@HL codec has become the center of digital video contents since it is the standard codec for the Digital TV (DTV). To provide the bridge between the contents in MPEG-2 and mobile terminals, the transcoding of MPEG-2 contents into H.264/AVC format is an inevitable technology in the digital video market. The main bottleneck in the process lies in the computational complexity. In H.264/AVC, the variable block size (VBS) mode decision (MD) is used in the Interframe for the improved performance in the motion compensated prediction. For the macroblock (MB) which cannot be accurately predicted with one motion vector (MV), it is partitioned into smaller blocks and predicted with different MVs. In addition, SKIP and Intra modes are also permitted in the Interframe MD of H.264/AVC to further ameliorate the encoding performance. With the VBS MD technology, the Inter prediction accuracy can be improved significantly. However, the incidental side-effect is the high computational complexity. In this paper, we propose a fast Interframe MD algorithm for MPEG-2 to H.264/AVC transcoding. The relationships between SKIP and Intra modes are detected at first to map these two kinds of modes directly from MPEG-2 to H.264/AVC. And then the MB activity will be scaled by the residual DCT energy obtained from the MPEG-2 decoding process to estimate the block sizes of the MB mode for H.264/AVC Interframe MD. In our proposed method, the original redundant candidate modes can be eliminated effectively, resulting in the reduction of the computational complexity. It can reduce about 85% Rate-to-Distortion Cost (RDCost) computing and 45% entire processing time compared with the well-known cascaded transcoder while maintaining the video quality.     

Improved mode decision algorithm based on residues and early zero block detection in H.264/AVC

Video compression standard H.264/AVC outperforms previous standards in terms of coding efficiency but at the cost of higher computational complexity. In H.264/AVC, the variable block size full motion estimation is the most time-consuming operation. This paper presents a method to reduce the complexity of motion estimation in two stages. The first stage exploits the similarities between frames for early SKIP mode decision for a macroblock (MB) based upon a criteria formulated on the basis of the statistics of the frame difference residues. MBs that fail to qualify for the SKIP mode in the first stage spills over to the second stage where mode decision depends upon the number of zero blocks (ZB) in the MB. The study of the full search motion estimation on different sequences show that there is a strong dependence between the number of ZBs in a MB and the likelihood of a particular mode being selected. The proposed algorithm utilizes this relationship for early mode decision for a MB. The algorithm is evaluated using a wide range of test sequences from different classes. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm gives considerable saving in encoding time and search points in the range of 36–87%. Furthermore, despite the reduction in computational complexity, the coding efficiency (picture quality and bitrate) in the proposed method is comparable to the H.264/AVC standard software Joint Model (JM12.4).     

General Architecture for MPEG-2/H.263/H.264/AVC to H.264/AVC Intra Frame Transcoding

The latest international video-coding standard H.264/AVC significantly achieves better coding performance compared to prior video coding standards such as MPEG-2 and H.263, which have been widely used in today’s digital video applications. To provide the interoperability between different coding standards, this paper proposes an efficient architecture for MPEG-2/H.263/H.264/AVC to H.264/AVC intra frame transcoding, using the original information such as discrete cosine transform (DCT) coefficients and coded mode type. Low-frequency components of DCT coefficients and a novel rate distortion cost function are used to select a set of candidate modes for rate distortion optimization (RDO) decision. For H.263 and H.264/AVC, a mode refinement scheme is utilized to eliminate unlikely modes before RDO mode decision, based on coded mode information. The experimental results, conducted on JM12.2 with fast C8MB mode decision, reveal that average 58%, 59% and 60% of computation (re-encoding) time can be saved for MPEG-2, H.263, H.264/AVC to H.264/AVC intra frame transcodings respectively, while preserving good coding performance when compared with complex cascaded pixel domain transcoding (CCPDT); or average 88% (a speed up factor of 8) when compared with CCPDT without considering fast C8MB. The proposed algorithm for H.264/AVC homogeneous transcoding is also compared to the simple cascaded pixel domain transcoding (with original mode reuse). The results of this comparison indicate that the proposed algorithm significantly outperforms the mode reuse algorithm in coding performance, with only slightly higher computation.     

融合宏块平坦度和时空相关性的预测模式选择算法

H.264/AVC以巨大编码复杂度为代价,在获得更高压缩率的同时,编码实时性也随之降低。针对视频编码中重要且耗时的帧间预测技术,分析了宏块平坦度和时空相关性,提出了一种快速的预测模式选择算法。仿真实验结果表明,本文提出算法与H.264/AVC(JM12.2)标准算法相比,在保持重建视频图像质量和输出码流结构的前提下,平均节省约70%的编码时间,并继承了H.264/AVC低码率的编码优势。     

Fast macroblock encoding algorithm based on rate-distortion activity for multiview video coding

Multiview video coding (MVC) is the appendix H of H.264/AVC, and it requires a great amount of time to compress multiple viewpoints׳ video with complex prediction structures. To reduce the whole computational complexity of MVC, this paper proposes a fast macroblock (MB) encoding algorithm based on rate-distortion (RD) activity, and it includes the fast mode decision and the fast motion/disparity estimation. First, the RD activity type of the current MB is calculated by utilizing the Skip/Direct RD cost and the average RD costs of classified MB modes. Then, through utilizing the RD activity type and RD costs of the estimated modes, the selection of candidate modes, the early decision of Skip/Direct mode, and the reduction of Inter8×8 mode estimation are all presented in the fast mode decision. By using the RD activity type and the correlations of vectors, the selection of search center and the prediction of search range are introduced in the fast motion/disparity estimation. In addition, the proposed algorithm can be applied to temporal and inter-view views as well as anchor and non-anchor frames. An experiment with a wide range of video scenes, camera setups and quantization parameters was implemented, and the results confirmed that the proposed algorithm can reduce the encoding time significantly while maintaining a similar RD performance as the original MVC encoder. Compared to the state-of-the-art algorithms, the proposed algorithm also demonstrated better performances in the various test cases.     

Efficient 45nm ASIC Architecture for Full-Search Free Intra Prediction in Real-Time H.264/AVC Decoder

The standard H.264/AVC Intra frame encoding process has several data dependent and computational intensive coding methodologies that limit the overall encoding speed. It causes not only a high degree of computational complexity but also an unacceptable delay especially for the real-time video applications. Based on DCT properties and spatial activity analysis, low power hardware architecture for high throughput Full-Search Free (FSF) Intra mode selection and direction prediction algorithm is proposed. The FSF Intra prediction Algorithm significantly reduces the computational complexity and the processing run-time required for the H.264/AVC Intra frame prediction process. The ASIC implementation for the proposed architecture is carried out and synthesizing results are obtained. The heavily tested 45nm ASIC design is able to achieve an operating frequency of 140 MHz while limiting the overall power consumption to 9.01 mW, which nominates our proposed FSF Intra prediction architecture for interactive real-time H.264/AVC mobile video decoders.     

A Fast Intra Skip Detection Algorithm for H.264/AVC Video Encoding

A fast intra skip detection algorithm based on the rate‐distortion (RD) cost for an inter frame (P‐slices) is proposed for H.264/AVC video encoding. In the H.264/AVC coding standard, a robust rate‐distortion optimization technique is used to select the best coding mode and reference frame for each macroblock (MB). There are three types of intra predictions according to profiles. These are 16×16 and 4×4 intra predictions for luminance and an 8×8 intra prediction for chroma. For the high profile, an 8×8 intra prediction has been added for luminance. The 4×4 prediction mode has 9 prediction directions with 4 directions for 16×16 and 8×8 luma, and 8×8 chrominance. In addition to the inter mode search procedure, an intra mode search causes a significant increase in the complexity and computational load for an inter frame. To reduce the computational load of the intra mode search at the inter frame, the RD costs of the neighborhood MBs for the current MB are used and we propose an adaptive thresholding scheme for the intra skip extraction. We verified the performance of the proposed scheme through comparative analysis of experimental results using joint model reference software. The overall encoding time was reduced up to 32% for the IPPP sequence type and 35% for the IBBPBBP sequence type.     

一种适宜于H.264/AVC的帧间快速编码算法

针对新一代视频编码技术H.264/AVC编码计算复杂 度较高,为提高其编码速度,提出了一种新的适宜于H.264/AVC 的帧间快速编码算法。首先利用运 动和纹理预测可能的编码模式,排除可能性较小的模式;然后利用时间和空间相关性预测各 种编码模式的 可能性大小和编码顺序,并结合相关性和量化参数利用率失真和残差系数提前终止。实验结 果表明,本文算法编码速度能提高72%左右,同时对编码效率影响很小。     

Fast mode-decision for H.264/AVC based on inter-frame correlations

The H.264/AVC standard yields higher coding efficiency rates than other video coding standards. This is because it uses the rate-distortion optimization (RDO) technique, which selects the optimal coding mode and a reference frame for each macroblock (MB). In order to achieve this, the encoder has to encode a given block by exhaustively using all kinds of combinations (including different intra and inter-prediction modes). As a result, the computational complexity of video coding in H.264/AVC is extremely high. In this paper, two fast intra-/inter-mode-decision algorithms are proposed to reduce the complexity of the encoder. Both of these algorithms are based on the inter-frame correlation among adjacent pictures. For the fast intra-mode-decision, we used the intra-mode of the most-correlated MB at the reference frame to encode the current MB and the stationary property of the current MB was used for the fast inter-mode-decision. The simulation results show that the proposed algorithms significantly reduced the computational complexity with a negligible loss of PSNR and a slight increase in bitrate.     

Hierarchical B-picture mode decision in H.264/SVC

To enable robust video transmission over heterogeneous networks, the hierarchical B-picture prediction structure is employed in the state-of-the-art video coding standard H.264/SVC, aiming to produce scalable bitstreams with various frame rates. However, the exhaustive mode decision process with the hierarchical B-picture structure increases the computational complexity of H.264/SVC encoding dramatically. In this paper, a fast mode decision algorithm is proposed to speed up H.264/SVC encoding with the hierarchical B-picture structure, which is achieved by utilizing macroblock (MB) features, correlation of temporal–spatial neighboring MBs, and the discrepant characteristics of hierarchical layers. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm is able to reduce the encoding time of H.264/SVC significantly for video sequences with a wide range of resolutions, and meanwhile the video quality and compression ratio are well preserved.     

Fast block mode decision algorithm in H.264/AVC video coding

The recent video coding standard H.264/AVC show extremely higher coding efficiency compare to any other previous standards. H.264/AVC can achieve over 50% of bit rate saving with same quality using the rate–distortion process, but it brings high computational complexity. In this paper, we propose an algorithm that can reduce the complexity of the codec by reducing the block mode decision process adaptively. Block mode decision process in H.264/AVC consists of inter mode decision process and intra mode decision process. We deal with reduction method for inter and intra mode decision. In this paper an efficient method is proposed to reduce the inter mode decision complexity using the direct prediction methods based on block correlation and adaptive rate distortion cost threshold for early stopping. The fast intra mode reduction algorithm based on inter mode information is also proposed to reduce the computational complexity. The experimental results show that the proposed algorithm can achieve up to 63.34–77.39% speed up ratio with a little PSNR loss. Increment in bit requirement is also not much noticeable.     

Rate control for hierarchical B-frames in H.264/AVC

Hierarchical B-frames can bring high coding performance when introduced into H.264/AVC.However,the traditional rate control schemes can not work efficiently in such new coding framework.This article presents a rate control algorithm for hierarchical B-frames in H.264/AVC.Taking the feature of the dyadic hierarchical coding structure into consideration,the proposed algorithm includes group of pictures(GOP)layer,temporal layer and frame layer bits allocation.After frame layer bits allocation is complete,frame layer quantization parameters(QP)determination strategy is responsible for calculating the final QP.Experimental results show that compared with other rate control algorithms,the proposed one can improve the coding performance and reduce the mismatch of target bit rate and real bit rate.     

H．264／AVC帧内预测模式不同快速算法的分析

快速帧内预测模式选择是一项提高H.264/AVC压缩性能的关键技术。H.264/AVC通过采用RDO(率失真优化)模式获得编码的性能提高,但这是以高计算复杂度为代价的。为了解决这个问题,首先对H.264/AVC的帧内预测算法进行研究,随后对不同快速算法进行分析,证明其都以不同方式大幅度提高了H.264/AVC帧内预测的速度,同时保持了较高的预测精度和主观图像质量。     

Content-Aware Fast Motion Estimation Algorithm

In this paper, we propose the Content-Aware Fast Motion Estimation Algorithm (CAFME) that can reduce computation complexity of motion estimation (ME) in H.264/AVC while maintaining almost the same coding efficiency. Motion estimation can be divided into two phases: searching phase and matching phase. In searching phase, we propose the Simple Dynamic Search Range Algorithm (SDSR) based on video characteristics to reduce the number of search points (SP). In matching phase, we integrate the Successive Elimination Algorithm (SEA) and the integral frame to develop a new SEA for H.264/AVC video compression standard, called Successive Elimination Algorithm with Integral Frame (SEAIF). Besides, we also propose the Early Termination Algorithm (ETA) to early terminate the motion estimation of current block.We implement the proposed algorithm in the reference software JM9.4 of H.264/AVC and the experimental results show that our proposed algorithm can reduce the number of search points about 93.1%, encoding time about 42%, while maintaining almost the same bitrate and PSNR.     

一种新型H.264/AVC多参考帧预测方法

在H.264/AVC视频压缩标准采用的几项关键技术中,使用多参考帧预测可以增加最佳匹配块的检索概率,进而大大提高了编码效率。受B帧直接(direct)预测模式的启发,提出了一种新的基于扩展帧的多参考帧预测方法,由多参考帧中的共同位置块及其参考块扩展得到一个新的抽取帧,增加了原始序列的时域分辨率,使得扩展帧更加接近当前帧,提高了运动估计中最佳匹配的检索概率,进而提升了编码效率。仿真结果证实该方法的编码性能好于H.264/AVC参考软件。     

VLC table prediction for CAVLC in H.264/AVC using correlation,statistics, and structural characteristics of mode information

The H.264/AVC video coding standard adopted context-based adaptive variable length coding (CAVLC) as an entropy coding tool. By combining adaptive variable length coding (VLC) with context modeling, we can achieve a high coding performance. However, CAVLC in H.264/AVC has the problem that VLC table prediction is not always accurate. In this paper, we propose a new VLC table prediction algorithm using the correlation between coding modes of the current and neighboring sub-blocks and the statistics of mode distribution in both intra and inter frames. In addition, we can further increase correctness of VLC table prediction considering the structural characteristics of mode information in inter frames. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm increases correctness of VLC table prediction by 10.07% and reduces the bit rate by 1.21% on average without significant increment of encoding time.     

基于改进KNN算法的AVS到H.264/AVC 快速转码方法

尽管音视频编码标准(Audio and Video Coding Standard,AVS)的编码性能可以与H.264相媲美,但是H.264的应用范围更加广泛,因此视频由AVS标准转码成H.264标准具有很大的应用前景.目前,主流的转码方法是将AVS的分块模式与H.264的分块模式映射的方式降低转码复杂度,但是技术之间的差异导致这两种标准之间的分块模式并不是一一映射的关系,因此会导致编码效率大幅度降低.提出一种基于改进KNN(K最邻近节点)算法的AVS到H.264/AVC快速转码方法.充分利用了AVS码流中的各种信息,通过改进的KNN算法建立了中间信息和H.264分块模式之间的映射模型.根据AVS中运动矢量信息的差异自适应确定H.264可能的分块模式,实验结果表明上述问题得到有效解决,该算法在保证H.264编码效率的前提下大幅降低了转码复杂度.     

新一代视频编码标准HEVC变换方法的研究

高性能视频编码( HEVC)将成为国际最新的视频编解码标准.该标准主要针对目前应用日益广泛的高清甚至超高清视频而开发,其编码的性能目标是在保持原来H.264/AVC的视频质量的同时,将比特率再降低一半.与原有标准一样,HEVC对帧内或帧间的残差信号进行正交变换以集中能量至矩阵左上角,然而H.264/AVC标准中的传统DCT方法对于高清视频的处理已不能有较好效果.讨论研究目前针对HEVC正交变换提出的变换方法,包括基于模式的方向变换MDDT、自适应离散余弦/正弦变换(DCT/DST)、旋转变换(ROT)、IDCT修剪和变换跳过模式(TSM)等方法.实验结果显示了上述几种方法在比特率降低、编码时间缩短、软硬件实现复杂度降低和客观视频质量等方面的改进.最后,提出了对HEVC正交变换的进一步研究方向.     

Parallel fast inter mode decision for H.264/AVC encoding

For H.264/AVC encoding, the mode selection process consumes a large proportion of the overall computation. To reduce this burden, various fast mode decision algorithms have been proposed. The current fast mode decision algorithms usually exploit the relationship among the coding modes and use the context-based approach to reduce the number of modes to be checked for both intra coding and inter coding. The parallel capacity of hardware architectures are also taken into consideration. However, almost all the parallel fast mode decision designs are focusing on intra coding. In this paper, a hardware friendly parallel fast inter mode decision method is proposed. With the proposed method, the inter mode decision can be conducted efficiently in one pass and significant encoding speedup can be achieved with negligible coding efficiency loss. Moreover, the proposed method can be easily mapped to hardware architecture which can be used for the real-time video encoding.     

Efficient intra-mode skip algorithm using RD costs of SUB8 3 8 and I4MB

H.264/AVC employs a rate-distortion (RD) optimisation technique to determine the best coding mode for each macroblock (MB). An intra-mode skip decision algorithm is presented based on RD costs of the SUB8 times 8 mode and the 14 MB mode to reduce the processing time. Experimental results on test video sequences show that the computational complexity has been reduced by about 20%, with nearly negligible loss of peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) value.