• Proceedings of the Korean Society of Broadcast Engineers Conference
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• 2010.11a
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• pp.14-17
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• 2010

Following the proliferation of three-dimensional video contents and displays, many terrestrial broadcasting companies prepare for starting stereoscopic 3DTV service. In terrestrial stereoscopic broadcast, it is a difficult task to code and transmit two video sequences while sustaining as high quality as 2DTV broadcast attains due to the limited bandwidth defined by the existing digital TV standards such as ATSC. Thus, a terrestrial 3DTV broadcasting system with heterogeneous video coding systems is considered for terrestrial 3DTV broadcast where the left image and right images are based on MPEG-2 and H.264/AVC, respectively, in order to achieve both high quality broadcasting service and compatibility for the existing 2DTV viewers. Without significant change in the current terrestrial broadcasting systems, we propose a joint rate control scheme for stereoscopic 3DTV service. The proposed joint rate control scheme applies to the MPEG-2 encoder a quadratic rate-quantization model which is adopted in the H.264/AVC. Then the controller is designed for the sum of two bit streams to meet the bandwidth requirement of broadcasting standards while the sum of image distortions is minimized by adjusting quantization parameter computed from the proposed optimization scheme. Besides, we also consider a condition on quality difference between the left and right images in the optimization. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed bit rate control scheme outperforms the rate control method where each video coding standard uses its own bit rate control algorithm in terms of minimizing the mean image distortion as well as the mean value and the variation of absolute image quality differences.

• The Journal of Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences
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• v.30 no.11C
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• pp.1098-1107
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• 2005

The emerging H.264/AVC video coding standard improves coding performance significantly by adopting many advanced techniques. This is achieved at the expense of great increasing encoder complexity. Specifically the intra prediction using RDO examines all possible combinations of coding modes, which depend on spatial directional correlation with adjacent blocks. For 4${\times}$4 luma blocks, there are 9 modes, and for 16${\times}$16 luma and 8${\times}$8 chroma blocks, there are 4 modes, respectively. Therefore the number of mode combinations for each macroblock is 592. This paper presents a method to reduce the RDO complexity using simple directional masks and neighboring modes. According to the proposed method, we reduce the number of mode combinations to 132 at the most. Experimental results show the proposed method reduces the encoding time up to $70\%$ with negligible loss of PSNR and bitrate increase compared to the H.264/AVC exhaustive search.

• Journal of Broadcast Engineering
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• v.20 no.6
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• pp.862-870
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• 2015

The RDO (Rate Distortion Optimization) process of HEVC results in good coding efficiency, but relatively requires much encoding time. In order to reduce the encoding time of RDO process, this paper proposes a method of fast intra prediction mode decision using DCT coefficients distributions and the existence of DCT coefficients. The proposed fast Intra coding sets the number of intra prediction mode candidates to three(3) from the RMD (Rough Mode Decision) process in HM16.0 reference SW and reduces the number of candidates one more time by investigating DCT coefficients distribution. After that, if there exists a quantized DCT block having all zero coefficient values for a specific candidate before the RDO process, the candidate is chosen without the RDO process. The proposed method reduces the encoder complexity on average 46%, while the coding efficiency is 2.1% decreased compared with the HEVC encoder.

• Journal of Broadcast Engineering
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• v.17 no.5
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• pp.765-780
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• 2012

In this paper, we propose a fast mode decision method that determines the coding unit depth for enhancement layers to improve an encoding speed of a scalable video encoder based on HEVC. To decide the coding unit depth of the enhancement layer, firstly, the coding unit depth of the corresponded coding unit in the basement layer is employed. At this stage, the final CU depth is decided by calculating the rate-distortion costs of one lower depth to one upper depth of the referenced depth. The proposed method can reduce a computational load since it does not calculate the rate-distortion costs for all the depths of a target CU. We found that the proposed algorithm decreases encoding complexity of 26% with approximately 1.4% bit increment, compared with the simulcast encoder of the HM 4.0.

• The Journal of Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences
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• v.32 no.8C
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• pp.720-728
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• 2007

For the improvement of coding efficiency, the H.264/AVC video coding standard employs new coding tools compared with existing coding standards. However, due to these new coding tools, the complexity of H.2641AVC encoder is greatly increased. Specially, Inter/Intra mode decision method of H.264/AVC using RDO(rate-distortion optimization) technique is one of the most complex parts in H.264/AVC. In this paper, we focus on the complexity reduction in macroblock mode decision considering coding efficiency. From the simulation results, the proposed algorithm reduce the encoding time by maximum 80% of total, and reduce the bitrate of the overall sequences by $8{\sim}10%$ on the average compared with existing coding methods.

• Journal of Broadcast Engineering
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• v.12 no.3
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• pp.250-265
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• 2007

In this paper, a fast intermode decision scheme is introduced by efficiently performing the mode decision using statistical hypothesis testing for hierarchical B-picture coding of SVC, in which much computational power is expensed for combined variable block sizes and hierarchical B-pictures. The hypothesis testing in the proposed method is performed on $16{\times}16\;and\;8{\times}8$ 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. The proposed scheme exhibits effective early termination behavior in intermode decision 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.

• The Journal of Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences
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• v.33 no.11C
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• pp.925-931
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• 2008

In video coding standard H.264/AVC, variable block size mode algorithm improves compression efficiency but has need of a large amount of computation for various block modes and mode decision. Meanwhile, decided inter block modes depend on the complexity of a block image, and then the more complex a macroblock is, the smaller its block size is. This paper proposes fast inter block mode decision algorithm. It limits valid block modes to the block modes with a great chance for decision using the image complexity and carries out motion estimation rate-distortion optimization with only the valid block modes. In addition to that, it applies fast motion estimation PDE to the valid block modes with only the $16{\times}16$ block mode. The reference software JM 9.5 was executed to estimate the proposed algorithm's performance. The simulation results showed that the proposed algorithm could save about 24.12% of the averaged motion estimation time while keeping the image quality and the bit rate to be -0.02dB and -0.12% on the average, respectively.

• The Journal of Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences
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• v.33 no.10C
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• pp.820-828
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• 2008

In order to achieve high coding efficiency, H.264/AVC video coding standard adopts the techniques such as variable block size coding, motion estimation with quarter-pel precision, multiple reference frames, rate-distortion optimization, and etc. However, these coding methods have a defect to greatly increase the complexity for motion estimation. Particularly, from multiple reference frame motion estimation, the computational burden increases in proportion to the number of the searched reference frames. Therefore, we propose the method to reduce the complexity by controlling the number of the searched reference frames in motion estimation. Proposed algorithm uses the optimal reference frame information in both $P16{\times}16$ mode and the adjacent blocks, thus omits unnecessary searching process in the rest of inter modes. Experimental results show the proposed method can save an average of 57.31% of the coding time with negligible quality and bit-rate difference. This method also can be adopted with any of the existing motion estimation algorithm. Therefore, additional performance improvement can be obtained.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SC
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• v.49 no.1
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• pp.29-38
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• 2012

The noise generated in the process of obtaining the medical image acts as the element obstructing the image interpretation and diagnosis. To restore the true image from the image polluted from the noise, the total variation optimization algorithm was proposed by the R.O. F (L.Rudin, S Osher, E. Fatemi). This method removes the noise by fitting the balance of the regularity and fidelity. However, the blurring phenomenon of the border area generated in the process of performing the iterative operation cannot be avoided. In this paper, we propose the adaptive total variation method by mapping the control parameter to the proposed transfer function for minimizing boundary error. The proposed transfer function is determined by the noise variance and the local property of the image. The proposed method was applied to 464 tooth images. To evaluate proposed method performance, PSNR which is a indicator of signal and noise's signal power ratio was used. The experimental results show that the proposed method has better performance than other methods.

• Journal of Broadcast Engineering
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• v.27 no.1
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• pp.31-43
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• 2022

Traditional video compression has developed so far based on hybrid compression methods through motion prediction, residual coding, and quantization. With the rapid development of technology through artificial neural networks in recent years, research on image compression and video compression based on artificial neural networks is also progressing rapidly, showing competitiveness compared to the performance of traditional video compression codecs. In this paper, a new method capable of improving the performance of such an artificial neural network-based video compression model is presented. Basically, we take the rate-distortion optimization method using the auto-encoder and entropy model adopted by the existing learned video compression model and shifts some components of the latent information that are difficult for entropy model to estimate when transmitting compressed latent representation to the decoder side from the encoder side, and finally compensates the distortion of lost information. In this way, the existing neural network based video compression framework, MFVC (Motion Free Video Compression) is improved and the BDBR (Bjøntegaard Delta-Rate) calculated based on H.264 is nearly twice the amount of bits (-27%) of MFVC (-14%). The proposed method has the advantage of being widely applicable to neural network based image or video compression technologies, not only to MFVC, but also to models using latent information and entropy model.