Variable Block Size Selection in Modern Video Coding Standards

by Amna Ahmad

Time, Date & Venue

03:30 PM Friday, 16th September 2005
Room 427 CS Department.

Abstract:

The long term H.264 standard has become popular for its capability to produce better compression performance as compared to any of the previous video coding standard. It is becoming the worldwide digital video standard for consumer electronics and personal computers. In particular, H.264 has already been selected as a key compression scheme (codec) for the next generation of optical disc formats, HD-DVD and Blu-ray disc (sometimes referred to as BD or BD-ROM). These achievements of H.264 can be attributed to the new features incorporated in the standard. Some of these key features are enhanced motion estimation with variable block size and quarter pel level motion estimation, integer block transform, improved in-loop de-blocking filter and enhanced entropy coding. High compression standards have been achieved using the H.264 standard but at the cost of increased computational complexity.

The main focus of this research has been to improve the computational complexity of motion estimation algorithm involving variable block size. Many techniques have been proposed that focus on improving the computational load but at the same time not considerably degrading the compression quality. The paper that will be discussed in this session proposes a simple early termination based strategy that has resulted in improving the encoding time with only slight degradation in the quality. Also an introduction to the 3DRS based variable block size selection is also proposed that achieves results similar to the full search algorithm but with reduced computational load. The idea to integrate early termination based schemes in the 3DRS based variable block size selection will also be discussed.