Hardware-friendly inter prediction techniques for AV1 video coding

摘要

The Alliance for Open Media (AOMedia) aims at generating a new, royalty-free video codec specification named AV1 that is scheduled for completion in the 2nd half of 2017. To facilitate AV1 market acceptance and rapid deployment, attention has been paid toward development of hardware friendly coding tools. This paper presents the following techniques to facilitate hardware implementation of AV1 inter prediction: 1) a simplified motion vector prediction scheme to reduce memory footprint / bandwidth; 2) methods to limit / remove the dependency between the computation of probability context model and the reconstruction of motion vectors to improve hardware throughput. Experimental results on a wide range of test clips show negligible quality impact for 1) and minor quality impact for 2) while the motion vectors line buffer memory footprint is reduced by 50%, motion vectors local memory is reduced by 33%, and the throughput of the arithmetic decoder remains unchanged.