CONSTANT BIT-RATE CONTROL EFFICIENCY WITH FAST MOTION ESTIMATION IN H.264/AVC VIDEO CODING STANDARD (FriAmOR4)

Author(s) : Daniele Alfonso (STMicroelectronics, Italy) Daniele Bagni (STMicroelectronics, Italy) Luca Celetto (STMicroelectronics, Italy) Simone Milani (University of Padova, Italy)

Abstract : The emerging H.264/AVC video coding standard provides significant enhancements in compression efficiency with respect to its ancestors in the MPEG and H.26x families. In this paper, we compare the performance of two different Constant Bit-Rate control methods, named JVT-D030/E069 and Rho-domain, applied to H.264/AVC compression at SD-TV resolution, with a fast, proprietary motion estimation algorithm. The experimental results demonstrate that the JVT-D030/E069 algorithm is very reliable, but sometimes requires encoding twice the same macroblock, which makes expensive its implementation for real-time, consumer-electronics devices such as DVD recorders. On the other hand, the Rho-domain method offers nearly the same accuracy of JVT-D030/E069 with reduced computational complexity (about 15-25% lower) and therefore it is more suitable for real-time application, although its dependence on pre-computed coefficients can limit its reliability for particular conditions.

Menu