• Journal of Broadcast Engineering
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• v.12 no.6
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• pp.596-610
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• 2007

In order to reduce the complexity of SVC encoding, we introduce a fast mode decision method in the enhancement layers of spatial scalability by selectively performing the inter-layer residual prediction of SVC. The Inter-layer residual prediction coding in Scalable Video Coding has a large advantage of enhancing the coding efficiency since it utilizes the correlation between two residuals from a lower spatial layer and its next higher spatial layer. However, this entails the dramatical increase in the complexity of SVC encoders. The proposed method is to analyze the characteristics of integer transform coefficients for the subtracted signal for two residuals from lower and upper spatial layers. Then it selectively performs the inter-layer residual prediction coding and rate-distortion optimizations in the upper spatial enhancement layer if the SAD values of residuals exceed adaptive threshold values. Therefore, by classifying the residuals according to the properties of integer-transform coefficients only with SAD of residuals between two layers, the SVC encoder can perform the inter-layer residual coding selectively, thus significantly reducing the total required encoding time. The proposed method results in reduction of the total encoding time with 51.5% in average while maintaining the RD performance with negligible amounts of quality degradation.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SP
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• v.44 no.2 s.314
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• pp.1-11
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• 2007

H.264/AVC uses variable block sizes to achieve significant coding gain. It has 7 different coding modes having different motion compensation block sizes in Inter slice, and 2 different intra prediction modes in Intra slice. This fine-tuned new coding feature has achieved far more significant coding gain compared with previous video coding standards. However, extremely high computational complexity is required when rate-distortion optimization (RDO) algorithm is used. This computational complexity is a major problem in implementing real-time H.264/AVC encoder on computationally constrained devices. Therefore, there is a clear need for complexity reduction algorithm of H.264/AVC such as fast mode decision. In this paper, we propose a fast mode decision with early $P8\times8$ mode rejection based on block size activity using large block history map (LBHM). Simulation results show that without any meaningful degradation, the proposed method reduces whole encoding time on average by 53%. Also the hybrid usage of the proposed method and the early SKIP mode decision in H.264/AVC reference model reduces whole encoding time by 63% on average.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SC
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• v.47 no.5
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• pp.43-51
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• 2010

Attenuation coefficients of medical ultrasound not only reflect the pathological information of tissues scanned but also provide the quantitative information to compensate the decay of backscattered signals for other medical ultrasound parameters. Based on the frequency-selective attenuation property of human tissues, attenuation estimation methods in spectral domain have difficulties for real-time implementation due to the complexicity while estimation methods in time domain do not achieve the compensation for the diffraction effect effectively. In this paper, we propose the modified VSA method, which compensates the diffraction with reference phantom in time domain, using adaptive bandpass filters with decreasing center frequencies along depths. The adaptive bandpass filtering technique minimizes the distortion of relative echogenicity of wideband transmit pulses and maximizes the signal-to-noise ratio due to the random scattering, especially at deeper depths. Since the filtering center frequencies change according to the accumulated attenuation, the proposed algorithm improves estimation accuracy and precision comparing to the fixed filtering method. Computer simulation and experimental results using tissue-mimicking phantoms demonstrate that the distortion of relative echogenicity is decreased at deeper depths, and the accuracy of attenuation estimation is improved by 5.1% and the standard deviation is decreased by 46.9% for the entire scan depth.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SP
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• v.44 no.4 s.316
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• pp.8-16
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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 K264/AVC standard encoder is greatly increased. Specifically, the inter/intra mode decision method 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. In the proposed method, we reduce the complexity of the $4{\times}4$ mode decision process using $4{\times}4$ simple square filters, and using spatial block correlation method. Additionally, exploiting the best mode of sub_macroblock in $Inter8{\times}8$ mode, we proposed an algorithm to eliminate some intra modes in current macroblock mode decision process. In addition, we employed a method to raise the probability to select SKIP, $Intra16{\times}16$, and $Intra16{\times}16$ modes which usually show low complexity and low bitrate compared with other modes. From the simulation results, the proposed algorithm reduce the encoding time by maximum 83% 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.13 no.5
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• pp.732-743
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• 2008

In H.264/AVC, 4$\times$4 block transform is used for intra and inter prediction instead of 8$\times$8 block transform. Using small block size coding, H.264/AVC obtains high temporal prediction efficiency, however, it has limitation in utilizing spatial redundancy. Motivated on these points, we propose a multi-dimensional transform which achieves both the accuracy of temporal prediction as well as effective use of spatial redundancy. From preliminary experiments, the proposed multi-dimensional transform achieves higher energy compaction than 2-D DCT used in H.264. We designed an integer-based transform and quantization coder for multi-dimensional coder. Moreover, several additional methods for multi-dimensional coder are proposed, which are cube forming, scan order, mode decision and updating parameters. The Context-based Adaptive Variable-Length Coding (CAVLC) used in H.264 was employed for the entropy coder. Simulation results show that the performance of the multi-dimensional codec appears similar to that of H.264 in lower bit rates although the rate-distortion curves of the multi-dimensional DCT measured by entropy and the number of non-zero coefficients show remarkably higher performance than those of H.264/AVC. This implies that more efficient entropy coder optimized to the statistics of multi-dimensional DCT coefficients and rate-distortion operation are needed to take full advantage of the multi-dimensional DCT. There remains many issues and future works about multi-dimensional coder to improve coding efficiency over H.264/AVC.

• Journal of Broadcast Engineering
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• v.20 no.2
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• pp.340-347
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• 2015

HEVC (High Efficiency Video Coding) achieves high coding efficiency by employing a quadtree-based coding unit (CU) block partitioning structure and various prediction units (PUs), and the determination of the best CU partition structure and the best PU mode based on rate-distortion (R-D) cost. However, the computation complexity of encoding also dramatically increases. In this paper, to reduce such encoding computational complexity, we propose three fast PU mode decision methods based on encoding information of upper depth as follows. In the first method, the search of PU mode of the current CU is early terminated based on the sub-CBF (Coded Block Flag) of upper depth. In the second method, the search of intra prediction modes of PU in the current CU is skipped based on the sub-Intra R-D cost of upper depth. In the last method, the search of intra prediction modes of PU in the lower depth's CUs is skipped based on the sub-CBF of the current depth's CU. Experimental results show that the three proposed methods reduce the computational complexity of HM 14.0 to 31.4%, 2.5%, and 23.4% with BD-rate increase of 1.2%, 0.11%, and 0.9%, respectively. The three methods can be applied in a combined way to be applied to both of inter prediction and intra prediction, which results in the complexity reduction of 34.2% with 1.9% BD-rate increase.

• Journal of Broadcast Engineering
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• v.16 no.4
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• pp.635-646
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• 2011

In distributed video coding, low complexity encoder can be realized by shifting encoder-side complex processes to decoder-side. However, not only motion estimation/compensation processes but also complex LDPC decoding process are imposed to the Wyner-Ziv decoder, therefore decoder-side complexity has been one important issue to improve. LDPC decoding process consists of numerous iterative decoding processes, therefore complexity increases as the number of iteration increases. This iterative LDPC decoding process accounts for more than 60% of whole WZ decoding complexity, therefore it can be said to be a main target for complexity reduction. Previously, HDA (Hard Decision Aided) method is introduced for fast LDPC decoding process. For currently received parity bits, HDA method certainly reduces the complexity of decoding process, however, LDPC decoding process is still performed even with insufficient amount of parity request which cannot lead to successful LDPC decoding. Therefore, we can further reduce complexity by avoiding the decoding process for insufficient parity bits. In this paper, therefore, a parity request estimation method is proposed using bit plane-wise correlation and temporal correlation. Joint usage of HDA method and the proposed method achieves about 72% of complexity reduction in LDPC decoding process, while rate distortion performance is degraded only by -0.0275 dB in BDPSNR.

• Journal of Korea Multimedia Society
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• v.11 no.5
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• pp.610-622
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• 2008

Moving object segmentation is an essential technique for various video surveillance applications. The result of moving object segmentation often contains shadow regions caused by the color difference of shadow pixels. Hence, moving object segmentation is usually followed by a shadow elimination process to remove the false detection results. The common assumption adopted in previous works is that, under the illumination variation, the value of chromaticity components are preserved while the value of intensity component is changed. Hence, color transforms which separates luminance component and chromaticity component are usually utilized to remove shadow pixels. In this paper, various color spaces (YCbCr, HSI, normalized rgb, Yxy, Lab, c1c2c3) are examined to find the most appropriate color space for shadow elimination. So far, there have been some research efforts to compare the influence of various color spaces for shadow elimination. However, previous efforts are somewhat insufficient to compare the color distortions under illumination change in diverse color spaces, since they used a specific shadow elimination scheme or different thresholds for different color spaces. In this paper, to relieve the limitations of previous works, (1) the amount of gradients in shadow boundaries drawn to uniform colored regions are examined only for chromaticity components to compare the color distortion under illumination change and (2) the accuracy of background subtraction are analyzed via RoC curves to compare different color spaces without the problem of threshold level selection. Through experiments on real video sequences, YCbCr and normalized rgb color spaces showed good results for shadow elimination among various color spaces used for the experiments.

• Journal of Broadcast Engineering
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• v.16 no.1
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• pp.108-122
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• 2011

In this paper, a transcoding method with low computational complexity and high coding efficiency is proposed to transcode distributed video coding (DVC) bitstreams to H.264/AVC ones. For the proposed high-performance transcoding with low complexity, not only Wyner-Ziv frames but also key frames can be transcoded with motion vectors estimated in generation of side information. As a motion vector is estimated from a key frame to a prior key frame for side information generation, the motion vector can be used to encode the intra key frame as a predicted frame. Motion estimation is performed with two predicted motion vectors. One is the motion vector from side information generation and the other is median of motion vectors of neighboring blocks. The proposed method selects the best motion vector between two motion vectors based on rate-distortion optimization. Coding efficiency can be improved with a small size of search range, because a motion vector estimated in side information generation is used as an initial motion vector for transcoding. In the experimental results, complexity of transcoder is reduced about 12% and bitrate performance increases about 28.7%.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information and Communication Engineering
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• v.20 no.2
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• pp.327-334
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• 2016

In this paper, we propose a hardware architecture of transform and quantization for high-perfornamce HEVC(High Efficiency VIdeo Coding) encoder. HEVC transform decides the transform mode by comparing RDCost to search for the best mode of them. But, RDCost is computed using the bit-rate and distortion which is computed by transform, quantization, de-quantization, and inverse transform. Due to the many calculations and encoding time, it is hard to process high resolution and high definition image in real-time. This paper proposes the method of transform mode decision by comparing sum of coefficient after transform only. We use BD-PSNR and BD-Bitrate which is performance indicator. Based on the experimental result, We confirmed that the decision of transform mode can process images with no significant change in the image quality. We reduced hardware area by assigning different values at the same output according to the transform mode and overlapping coefficient multiplied as much as possible. Also, we raise performance by implementing sequential pipeline operation. In view of the larger process that we used compared with the process of reference paper, Our design has reduced by half the hardware area and has increased performance 2.3 times.