• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.9 no.4
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• pp.12-18
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• 2009

In this paper, we propose a novel method which efficiently codes $4{\times}4$ intra prediction modes in H.264/ AVC video encoding. There are nine optional prediction modes for each $4{\times}4$luma block and 4 modes for each $16{\times}16$luma block. To code each $4{\times}4$ intra prediction mode, lots of bits are required. To efficiently compress the intra mode bits in H.264/AVC, the most probable mode(MPM) is estimated by using the intra modes of the adjacent blocks, since intra modes for neighboring $4{\times}4$luma blocks are correlated. In this paper, a novel method for estimating the MPM is proposed by using the statistical distribution of intra modes of adjacent intra blocks. Experimental results show that the proposed method can achieve a coding gain of about 0.1dB.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SD
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• v.47 no.5
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• pp.24-30
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• 2010

In this paper, we described intra prediction which is the one of techniques to be used for higher compression performance in H.264/AVC and proposed the design of intra predictor for efficient intra prediction mode processing. The proposed system is consist of processing elements, precomputation processing elements, an intra prediction controller, an internal memory and a register controller. The proposed system needs the reduced the computation cycles by using processing elements and precomputation processing element and also needs the reduced the number of access time to external memory by using internal memory and registers architecture. We designed the proposed system with Verilog-HDL and verified with suitable test vectors which are encoded YUV files. The proposed architecture belongs to the baseline profile of H.264/AVC decoder and is suitable for portable devices such as cellular phone with the size of $176{\times}144$. As a result of experiment, the performance of the proposed intra predictor is about 60% higher than that of the previous one.

• Journal of KIISE:Computing Practices and Letters
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• v.15 no.4
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• pp.280-283
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• 2009

To improve coding performance of scalable video coding which is an emerging video coding standard as an extension of H.264/AVC, SVC uses not only intra prediction and inter prediction but inter-layer prediction. This causes a problem that computational complexity is increased. In this paper, we propose an efficient intra prediction mode decision method in spatial enhancement layer to reduce the computational complexity. The proposed method selects Inra_BL mode using RD cost of Intra_BL in advance. After that, intra mode is decided by only comparing DC modes. Experimental results show that the proposed method reduces 59% of the computation complexity of intra prediction coding, while the degradation in video quality is negligible.

• The Journal of Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences
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• v.33 no.12C
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• pp.1046-1054
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• 2008

Since the high quality digital TV systems are broadly deployed in the market, the digital video contents will be edited and distributed in MPEG-2 MP@HL fonnat. Due to its impressive coding efficiency, the H.264/AVC codec has rapidly replaced the MPEG-4 SP codec for mobile digital video terminal with low quality. For the bro ad distribution of digitial video contents produced in MPEG-2 format, the MPEG-2 to H.264/AVC transcoding is highly necessary nowadays. In this paper, we propose a fast intra MB prediction mode decision method to reduce the computational complexity in the transcoding, which is the main bottleneck in the transcoders. The proposed method is based on the several relationships such as DCT coefficients and edge orientation, correlation between prediction directions in the $Intra16{\times}16$ and $Intra4{\times}4$ modes, correlation between edge-orientations of luminance an d chrominance components. The simulation results show that the proposed method can reduce the computational complexity upto 70% and 40%, compared with the cascaded transcoder and the well-known fast intraframe transc oder, respectively.

• The Journal of Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences
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• v.31 no.5C
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• pp.503-511
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• 2006

H.264 adopts new coding tools such as intra-prediction, loop filter, etc. The adoption of these tools enables an H.264-coded bitstream to have more information compared with previous standards. In this paper we proposed an effective spatial error concealment method for H.264. Among the information included in an H.264-coded bitstream, we use intra-mode for recovering a damaged block. This is because prediction direction in intra-mode is highly correlated to the edge direction of a lost macroblock. We first estimate the edge direction using intra-modes of blocks adjacent to a lost macroblock, and classify the area in a damaged macroblock into the edge and the flat area. And then our method recovers pixel values in the edge area using edge-directed interpolation, and recovers pixel values in the flat area using weighted interpolation. Simulation results show the proposed method yields better video quality than conventional approaches by 0.35 to 5.48 dB.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society of Computer Information Conference
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• 2012.07a
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• pp.87-88
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• 2012

Because intra prediction modes in H.264 are determined by the brightness continuity between neighboring blocks, they can be used as a method for extracting edge information in the compression domain. However, if we just consider 9 intra prediction modes in H.264 as 9 different edge directions, we have the following two problems. First, intra prediction modes tend to yield too many edge blocks, generating unnecessary edge information. Second, we may not need all 9 directional edges (including the DC type) in H.264 intra prediction modes. For example, the EHD (edge histogram descriptor) in MPEG-7 defines only 4 directional edge types, namely horizontal, vertical, diagonal (HVD) edges with $0^{\circ}$, $90^{\circ}$, $45^{\circ}$, and $135^{\circ}$. Here, semi-diagonal (SD) edge types with $112.5^{\circ}$, $157.5^{\circ}$, $22.5^{\circ}$, and $67.5^{\circ}$ in the intra prediction modes in H.264 are not used. In this paper. we prepose a method that removes unnecessary edges from the intra prediction modes by utilizing the total average coefficient of 4x4 blocks in each slice and assign SD edges to HVD (horizontal, vertical, diagonal, $0^{\circ}$, $90^{\circ}$, $45^{\circ}$, $135^{\circ}$) edges by the contextual information of the neighboring blocks. Experimental results show that the edges determined by the proposed method in the compression domain are comparable to those of the previous edge detection methods in the spatial domain.

• Journal of Broadcast Engineering
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• v.17 no.3
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• pp.471-479
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• 2012

Intra prediction is one of the significant techniques in H.264/AVC reference software; however, it has heavy computational complexity. In order to solve this problem, many fast algorithms have been proposed. In this paper, we propose a fast intra mode decision algorithm which predicts the edge direction of the current block using sub-sampled pixels to reduce high computational complexity of the H.264/AVC encoder. The proposed algorithm shows that it not only improves the coding performance but also reduces the computational complexity of the H.264/AVC encoder compared to previous algorithms. The experimental results show that the proposed algorithm achieves the encoding time reduction of 75.93% on an average with slight peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) drop and bit-rate increment.

• The Journal of Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences
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• v.34 no.7C
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• pp.681-686
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• 2009

In H.264/Ave, an intra prediction added to the P-frame coding slightly improves both of image quality and bit rate, but greatly increases an amount of computation. In order to reduce the increase in computation, this paper proposes an image contents based intra prediction coding using characteristics that the best intra block mode depends on the image content of a macro block. The proposed algorithm estimates the image content with image complexity and the best inter block mode, and then selects or excludes a intra block mode on the basis of it. The simulation results show that the proposed algorithm reduces average O.OldB in image quality, and increases average 0.38% in the bit rate, but reduces average 37.02% in computation time compared with the conventional algorithm.

• The Journal of Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences
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• v.38A no.6
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• pp.492-503
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• 2013

H.264/AVC has shown high coding efficiency by using various coding tools, including intra and inter prediction. However, there are still many more redundancy components in intra prediction than in inter prediction. In this paper, a novel intra prediction method is proposed with adaptive mode selection. The combined intra prediction modes and simplified gradient modes are added in order to refine the directional feature and gradation region. Suitable modes are selected according to the neighboring blocks that provide a high compression rate and lower computational complexity. The improvement of the proposed method is 1.96% in terms of the bitrate, 0.25 dB in PSNR, and 1.72 times in terms of the computational complexity.

• The Journal of Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences
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• v.34 no.8C
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• pp.790-800
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• 2009

For the improvement of coding efficiency, the H.264/AYC standard uses new coding tools such as 1/4-pel-accurate motion estimation, multiple references, intra prediction, loop filter, variable block size etc. Using these coding tools, H.264/AYC has achieved significant improvements from rate-distortion point of view compared to existing standards. However, the encoder complexity was greatly increased due to these coding tools. We focus on the complexity reduction method of intra macroblock mode selection. The proposed algorithm for fast intra mode selection calculates the edge activity in transform domain, and performs fast encoding of intra frame in H.264/AYC through the fast prediction mode selection of intra4x4 and chrominance blocks. Simulation results show that the proposed method saves about 59.76% for QCIF sequences and 65.03% for CIF sequences of total encoding time, while bitrate increase and PSNR decrease are very small.