An All-Zero Block Mode Decision Algorithm for H.264/AVC Optimization

Chaoke PEI, Li GAO, Donghui WANG, Chaohuan HOU

Summary :

The H.264/AVC standard achieves significantly high coding efficiency if multiple block size Motion Estimation is adopted. However, the complexity of Motion Estimation and DCT is dramatically increased as a result. In previous work we propose an early mode decision algorithm to control the complexity, based on all-zero-blocks detection in 1616 size. In this paper, we improve the algorithm. Firstly, we propose to detect all-zero blocks in 1616, 88 and 44 sizes to simplify the course of mode decision. Secondly, we define the thresholds which are used to terminate motion estimation and mode decision in advance for these sizes. Last, we present the whole proposed algorithm. Experiments show that about 77% encoding time and 85% motion estimation time can be saved on average, which is better than state-of-the-art approaches.

• Publication: IEICE TRANSACTIONS on Information Vol.E94-D No.2 pp.384-387
• Publication Date: 2011/02/01
• Online ISSN: 1745-1361
• DOI: 10.1587/transinf.E94.D.384
• Type of Manuscript: LETTER
• Category: Image Processing and Video Processing

Authors

Chaoke PEI
Li GAO
Donghui WANG
Chaohuan HOU

Keyword

H.264/AVC,  early mode decision,  all-zero block,  motion search