• The Journal of Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences
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• v.30 no.3C
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• pp.102-111
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• 2005

In this paper, we propose an advanced hardware architecture for the fast inter prediction engine of the video coding standard MPEG-4 AVC. We describe the algorithm and derive the hardware architecture emphasizing and real time operation of the quarter_pel based motion estimation. The fast inter prediction engine is composed of block segmentation, motion estimation, motion compensation, and the fast quarter_pel calculator. The proposed architecture has been verified by ARM-interfaced emulation board using Excalibur & Virtex2 FPGA, and also by synthesis on Samsung 0.18 um CMOS technology. The synthesis result shows that the proposed hardware can operate at 62.5MHz. In this case, it can process about 88 QCIF video frames per second. The hardware is being used as a core module when implementing a complete MPEG-4 AVC video encoder chip for real-time multimedia application.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.10 no.3
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• pp.1195-1211
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• 2016

The emerging video coding standard High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) has shown almost 40% bit-rate reduction over the state-of-the-art Advanced Video Coding (AVC) standard but at about 40% computational complexity overhead. The main reason for HEVC computational complexity is the inter prediction that accounts for 60%-70% of the whole encoding time. In this paper, we propose several fast coding unit (CU) encoding schemes based on the Merge mode and motion estimation information to reduce the computational complexity caused by the HEVC inter prediction. Firstly, an early Merge mode decision method based on motion estimation (EMD) is proposed for each CU size. Then, a Merge mode based early termination method (MET) is developed to determine the CU size at an early stage. To provide a better balance between computational complexity and coding efficiency, several fast CU encoding schemes are surveyed according to the rate-distortion-complexity characteristics of EMD and MET methods as a function of CU sizes. These fast CU encoding schemes can be seamlessly incorporated in the existing control structures of the HEVC encoder without limiting its potential parallelization and hardware acceleration. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed schemes achieve 19%-46% computational complexity reduction over the HEVC test model reference software, HM 16.4, at a cost of 0.2%-2.4% bit-rate increases under the random access coding configuration. The respective values under the low-delay B coding configuration are 17%-43% and 0.1%-1.2%.

• Journal of Korea Multimedia Society
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• v.15 no.7
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• pp.859-869
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• 2012

The Multi-view Video Coding (MVC) which is exploiting disparities between views has been developed to improve the coding efficiency of multi-view video. But MVC has a problem of having high computing complexities because of disparity estimation. This paper propose a fast mode decision for non-anchor picture to reduce the computational time of MVC. The proposed method uses two phases. Anchor pictures in hierarchical B picture structure have a higher correlation with prediction mode selection of non-anchor pictures, so in the first phase, prediction mode of non-anchor pictures is selected by exploiting the macro-block regions in anchor picture. In the second phase, we select a reference direction of inter prediction mode exploiting a higher correlation among reference directions of inter prediction modes of 7 block sizes. Experimental results show that the proposed method could save average about 44% in the encoding time with negligible coding efficiency losses.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SP
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• v.42 no.4 s.304
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• pp.133-142
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• 2005

In this paper, two digital video scrambling methods are proposed as simple means of the digital content protection techniques. One is inter block scrambling using motion vector, the other is intra block scrambling using intra prediction mode. The proposed inter block scrambling method distorts the original sequences by swapping horizontal and vertical components of motion vector. This method can be applied on most common video coding techniques such as MPEG-1, 2, 4, H.264, etc. The proposed intra block scrambling method distorts the original sequences by modifying intra prediction mode that is property of H.254 video coding technique. Both methods do not cause my bit rate increase after scrambling. Moreover, they have low complexity because they need only simple operation like XOR. Especially, the proposed intra block scrambling does not distort inter blocks directly. But inter blocks are distorted by error propagation effect as much as intra blocks. This paper introduces two new digital video scrambling method and verifies its effectiveness through simulation.

• Journal of Korea Multimedia Society
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• v.13 no.2
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• pp.185-195
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• 2010

In this paper, we propose an efficient inter and intra prediction algorithms for fast encoding of H.264/AVC. First, inter prediction mode decision method decides early using temporal/spatial correlation information and pixel direction information. Second, intra prediction mode decision method selects block size judging smoothness degree with inner/outer pixel value variation and decides prediction mode using representative pixel and reference pixel. Lastly, adaptive motion search region restriction sets search region using mode information of neighboring block and predicted motion vector. The experimental results show that proposed method can achieve about 18~53% reduction compared with the existing JM 14.1 in the encoding time. In RD performance, the proposed method does not cause significant PSNR value losses while increasing bitrates slightly.

• The Journal of Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences
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• v.30 no.12C
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• pp.1153-1161
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• 2005

The latest standard H.264 coding methods show better efficiency compared to the former coding standards from the rate distortion point of view, but also lead to high complexity. In this paper, we propose an adaptive and fast inter/intra prediction algorithm for H.264 video coding. In the inter prediction algorithm, an effective and simple mode selection method is proposed, which can adaptively adjust to motion estimation to reduce complexity. And proposed intra prediction algorithm reduces its complexity by using calculated Minimum Rate-Distortion costs in the prediction of Intra $16{\times}16$ and $4{\times}4$ modes. From experiment using JM8.4, our algorithm can reduce about $60.9\%$ of computation time as compared to JM, with only negligible PSNR and bitrate degradation.

• Journal of Broadcast Engineering
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• v.19 no.2
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• pp.227-239
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• 2014

This paper proposes an enhance prediction for conventional near-lossless coder to effectively lower external memory bandwidth in image processing SoC. First, we utilize an already reconstructed green component as a base of predictor of the other color component because high correlation between RGB color components usually exists. Next, we can improve prediction performance by applying variable block size prediction. Lastly, we use minimum internal memory and improve a temporal prediction performance by using a template dictionary that is sampled in previous frame. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm shows better performance than the previous works. Natural images have approximately 30% improvement in coding efficiency and CG images have 60% improvement on average.

• Journal of Broadcast Engineering
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• v.12 no.6
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• pp.611-623
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• 2007

The H.264|AVC standard incorporates an intra prediction tool into inter frame coding. However, this leads to excessive amount of increase in encoding time, thus resulting in the difficulty in real-time implementation of software encoders. In this paper, we first propose an early decision on intra prediction coding and a fast intra prediction method using the characteristics of block contents and the context of neighboring block modes for the intra prediction in the inter frame coding of H.264/AVC. Basically, the proposed methods determine a skip condition on whether the $4{\times}4$ intra prediction is to be used in the inter frame coding by considering the content characteristics of each block to be encoded and the context of its neighboring blocks. The performance of our proposed methods is compared with the Joint Model reference software version 11.0 of H.264|AVC. The experimental results show that our proposed methods allow for 41.63% reduction in the total encoding time with negligible amounts of PSNR drops and bitrate increases, compared to the original Joint Model reference software version 11.0.

• Journal of KIISE:Computing Practices and Letters
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• v.14 no.8
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• pp.793-797
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• 2008

To achieve flexible visual contents adaptation for multimedia communications, the ISO/IEC MPEG & ITU-T VCEG form the JVT to develop an SVC amendment for the H.264/AVC standard. JVT uses inter-layer prediction that can improve the rate-distortion efficiency of the enhancement layer. But inter-layer prediction causes computational complexity to be increased. In this paper, we propose a fast mode decision for inter frame coding. It makes use of the correlation between optimized prediction mode and its RD cost. Experimental results show that the proposed schemes save up to 38% of encoding time with a negligible coding loss and bit-rate increase.

• Journal of Broadcast Engineering
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• v.26 no.5
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• pp.652-655
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• 2021

Among various inter prediction techniques of Versatile Video Coding (VVC), adaptive motion vector resolution (AMVR) technology has been adopted. However, for AMVR, various MVs should be tested per each coding unit, which needs a computation of rate-distortion cost and results in an increase in encoding complexity. Therefore, in order to reduce the encoding complexity of AMVR, it is necessary to effectively find an optimal AMVR mode. In this paper, we propose a lightweight neural network-based AMVR decision algorithm based on more diverse datasets.