A frame-level data re-use & mode decision strategy for H.264/AVC encoders
Zhuo Zhao, Ping Liang · 2006
The H.264/AVC video compression standard exhibits excellent compression ratio due to many new features compared with its previous counterparts. Among these features, multiple reference inter-prediction and variable block-size play very important roles. However, their implementations require high memory access bandwidth. For real-time implementation, it is critical to reduce the memory access bandwidth. For this purpose, this paper presents a Partial Forward Processing Algorithm (PFPA) for frame-level data re-use and a mode decision strategy. Simulation results show that up to 2/3 of the original memory access bandwidth can be saved when using five reference frames with a search range of [-64,64]. The new mode decision method avoids sharply increased memory size used to store intermediate processing results and at the same time, the PSNR for the decoded sequence is very close to the optimal result produced by the reference software JM9.0 provided by the Joint Video Team (JVT) [1].