• Journal of the Institute of Electronics and Information Engineers
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• v.53 no.6
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• pp.130-136
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• 2016

HEVC (High Efficiency Video Coding) extension considers screen content as one of its main candidate sources for encoding. Among the tools already included in HEVC version 1, the technique of using transform skip mode allows transform to be skipped and to perform quantization process only. It is known to improve video coding efficiency for screen contents which are characterized to have much high frequency energy. But encoding complexity increases since its encoder should decide whether transform should be used or not in each $4{\times}4$ transform block. Based on statistical correlation between IBC (Intra block copy) and transform skip modes both of which are known effective in screen contents, this paper proposes a combined method of the fast transform skip mode decision and a modified transform skip signaling which signals transform_skip_flag at CU level as a representative transform skip signal. By simulation, the proposed method is shown to reduce encoding time of $4{\times}4$ transform blocks by about 32%.

• The Journal of Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences
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• v.39A no.4
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• pp.172-179
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• 2014

HEVC (High Efficiency Video Coding) fine-tuned many existing coding tools and adopted also many new coding techniques. As a result, HEVC has accomplished about 2 times of compression efficiency enhancement compared to the existing video coding standard of H.264/AVC. One of the newly adopted tools in HEVC is the transform skip scheme which performs quantization without transform. This technique improves coding efficiency especially with computer-generated images. However, the unavailability of global or local properties of general video signals demands encoder to decide whether performing transform or not for each TU (Transform Unit). The necessity of computing rate-distortion costs for this decision is one reason to increase encoder complexity. In this paper, a fast transform skip mode decision method is proposed, which is based on the fast decision of rate-distortion cost calculation for transform skip mode, by considering frequency characteristics of residual signal. The proposed method can reduce $4{\times}4$ TU encoding time by about 27.1% with only about 0.03% consequential decrement in BDBR.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SP
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• v.43 no.6 s.312
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• pp.11-19
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• 2006

The recent video coding standard H.264 employs the rate-distortion optimization (RDO) method for choosing the best coding mode; however, it causes a large amount of encoding time. Thus, in order to reduce the encoding time, we need a fast mode decision algorithm. In this paper, we propose a fast inter mode decision algorithm considering quantization parameter (QP). The occurrence of best modes depends on QP. In order to reflect these characteristics, we consider the coded block pattern (CBP) which has 0 value when all quantized discrete cosine transform (DCT) coefficients are zero. We also use the early SKIP mode decision and early $16{\times}16$ mode decision methods. By computer simulations, we have verified that the proposed algorithm requires less encoding time than the fast inter mode decision method of the H.264 reference software for the Baseline and Main profiles by 19.6% and 18.8%, respectively.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SP
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• v.49 no.3
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• pp.40-50
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• 2012

In this paper we propose the fast CU (Coding Unit) mode decision method. To reduce computational complexity and save encoding time of HEVC, we divided CU, PU (Prediction Unit) and TU (Transform Unit) decision process into two stages. In the first stage, because $2N{\times}2N$ PU mode is mostly selected among $2N{\times}2N$, $N{\times}2N$, $2N{\times}N$, $N{\times}N$ PU modes, proposed algorithm uses only $2N{\times}2N$ PU mode deciding depth of each CU in the LCU (Largest CU). And then, proposed method decides exact PU and TU modes at the depth level which is decided in the first stage. In addition, early skip decision rule is applied to the proposed method to obtain more efficient computational complexity reduction. The proposed method reduces computational complexity of the HEVC encoder by simplifying a CU depth decision method. We could obtain about 50% computational complexity reduction in comparison with HM 3.3 HEVC reference software while bitrate compressed by the proposed algorithm increases only 2%.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics and Information Engineers
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• v.53 no.11
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• pp.41-47
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• 2016

High efficiency video coding (HEVC) employs a coding tree unit (CTU) to improve the coding efficiency. A CTU consists of coding units (CU), prediction units (PU), and transform units (TU). All possible block partitions should be performed on each depth level to obtain the best combination of CUs, PUs, and TUs. To reduce the complexity of block partitioning process, this paper proposes the PU mode skip algorithm with region of interest (RoI) selection using motion vector. In addition, this paper presents the CU depth level skip algorithm using the co-located block information in the previously encoded frames. First, the RoI selection algorithm distinguishes between dynamic CTUs and static CTUs and then, asymmetric motion partitioning (AMP) blocks are skipped in the static CTUs. Second, the depth level skip algorithm predicts the most probable target depth level from average depth in one CTU. The experimental results show that the proposed fast CU decision algorithm can reduce the total encoding time up to 44.8% compared to the HEVC test model (HM) 14.0 reference software encoder. Moreover, the proposed algorithm shows only 2.5% Bjontegaard delta bit rate (BDBR) loss.