A Fast Inter Prediction Encoding Technique for Real-time Compression of H.264/AVC
Younghyun Kim, Hyun-Jun Choi, Young-Ho Seo, Dong Wook Kim · 2006
This paper proposed a fast algorithm to reduce the amount of calculation for inter prediction which takes a great deal of the operational time in H.264/AVC. This algorithm decides a search range according to the direction of predicted motion vector, and then performs an adaptive spiral search for the candidates with JM(Joint Model) FME(Fast Motion Estimation) which employs the rate-distortion optimization(RDO) method. Simultaneously, it decides a threshold cost value for each of the variable block sizes and performs the motion estimation for the variable search ranges with the threshold. These activities reduce the great amount of the complexity in inter prediction encoding. Experimental results by applying the proposed method .to various video sequences showed that the process time was decreased up to 80% comparing to the previous prediction methods. The degradation of video quality was only from 0.05dB to 0.19dB and the compression ratio decreased as small as 0.58% in average. Therefore, we are sure that the proposed method is an efficient method for the fast inter prediction.