An efficient block mode decision for temporal scalability in scalable video coding
Bumshik Lee, Munchurl Kim, Sangjin Hahm, Changseob Park, Keunsoo Park · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 2007
In this paper, a fast intermode decision scheme which is suitable for the hierarchical B-picture structure in which much computational power is spent for combined variable block sizes and bi-predictive motion estimation is introduced. The hypothesis testing considering the characteristics of the hierarchical B-picture structure in the proposed method is performed on 16x16 and 8x8 blocks to have early termination for RD computation of all possible modes. The early termination in intermode decision is performed by comparing the pixel values of current blocks and corresponding motion-compensated blocks. When the hypothesis tests are performed, the confidence intervals to accept the null hypothesis or not are decided according to the temporal scalability levels under the consideration of properties of hierarchical B-pictures. The proposed scheme exhibits effective early termination behavior in intermode decision of temporal scalabilities and leads to a significant reduction up to 69% in computational complexity with slight increment in bit amounts. The degradation of visual quality turns out to be negligible in terms of PSNR values.