Enhancing Inter Frame Prediction in Advanced Video Codecs

Abstract

In real time applications such as video streaming and video conferencing it is important that the video encoding/decoding is fast. H.264/MPEG-4 Part 10 or AVC (advanced video coding) is currently one of the most widely used industry standards for video compression. It has been developed to achieve significant improvements, in the compression performance, over the existing standards. In fact, the high compression performance is accomplished by the implementation of intra and inter prediction techniques that remove spatial and temporal redundancies. Most video coding standards depend heavily on the use of inter frame prediction technique to obtain high compression efficiency. Inter prediction technique is developed by motion estimation (ME) and motion compensation (MC) techniques. It is known, that most of the complexity of the H.264/AVC compression standard lies in the H.264 encoder. Motion estimation (ME) introduces high computational complexity. It consumes about 70% of the time required for H.264 encoder.