Statistical and spatiotemporal correlation based low-complexity video coding for high-efficiency video coding

摘要

High-efficiency video coding (HEVC) is a new coding standard that adopts the quadtree splitting structure based on coding tree units instead of macroblocks, and can support more coding modes and more partitions. Although it can improve compression efficiency, the flexible quadtree block partition and mode selection result in high computational complexity in real-time applications. We propose a low-complexity video coding algorithm for HEVC by utilizing statistical correlation and spatiotemporal correlation, which consists of an early determination of SKIP mode (EDSM) method and an early termination of reference frame selection (ETRFS) method. Since there is a strong correlation for the rate distortion (RD) cost for the SKIP mode between adjacent frames, EDSM detects the SKIP mode according to the threshold derived from the former training frame. Meanwhile, ETRFS terminates the process of reference frame selection using the motion vector and reference frame information from neighboring blocks to skip unnecessary candidate frames. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method can achieve about 45.01% complexity reduction on average with a 1.11% BD-rate increase and 0.04 BD-PSNR decrease for random access. The complexity reduction, BD-rate increase, and BD-PSNR decrease for low delay are 46.16%, 0.99%, and 0.03, respectively. (C) 2015 SPIE and IS&T