Complexity adaptive H.264 encoding using multiple reference frames

Abstract

The state-of-the-art H.264/AVC video coding standard achieves significant improvements in coding efficiency by introducing many new coding techniques. However the computation complexity is inevitably increased during both the encoding and decoding process. Many previous works, such as fast motion estimation and fast mode decision algorithms, have been proposed aiming at reducing the encoder complexity while maintaining the coding efficiency. In this paper, we propose a new encoding approach which accounts for the decoding complexity. Simulation results show that the decoding complexity can be reduced by up to 15% in terms of motion compensation operations, which is the most complex part of the decoder, while maintaining the R-D performance with only about 0.1 dB degradation.