Video compression with tunable complexity via flexible syntax design

Yuxin Liu; Debargha Mukherjee

doi:10.1117/12.768045

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28 January 2008 Video compression with tunable complexity via flexible syntax design

Proceedings Volume 6822, Visual Communications and Image Processing 2008; 682212 (2008) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.768045
Event: Electronic Imaging, 2008, San Jose, California, United States

Abstract

Codecs such as H.264/AVC involve computationally intensive tasks that often prohibit the real-time implementation. It has been observed that the complexity of such video encoders can be tuned gracefully to a desired level through the use of a smaller set of macroblock types in mode decision and a lower motion vector precision in motion estimation. The rate-distortion performance, however, will be affected consequently. In this paper, we propose a flexible syntax mechanism (FSM) to tune the encoder complexity while maintaining a sufficient rate-distortion performance. The key idea inherit in the proposed FSM consists of two folds: first is the specification at the higher level of the bitstream syntax both the subset of macroblock types and the precision of motion vectors to be evaluated by the encoder, and second is the redesign of the entropy coders accordingly to effectively represent the selected macroblock types and the motion vectors. Since the entropy coding is optimized in terms of the bitrate consumption specifically for the subset of macroblock modes and the motion vector precision, the rate-distortion performance will be enhanced compared to the scenario where identical entropy codes are adopted regardless. Another advantage of our approach is the intrinsic scalability in complexity for the application of video encoding under different complexity constraints. The proposed approach may be considered for the next generation of video codecs with flexible complexity profiles.

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Yuxin Liu and Debargha Mukherjee "Video compression with tunable complexity via flexible syntax design", Proc. SPIE 6822, Visual Communications and Image Processing 2008, 682212 (28 January 2008); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.768045

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