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Fast algorithms for designing nearly optimal lookup tables for complexity control of the H.264 encoder

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Abstract

The H.264/AVC standard significantly improves video compression performance over earlier standards at the cost of increased complexity. In this paper, we present two offline algorithms for generating a lookup table of parameter settings that can be used by a complexity control algorithm for controlling the speed of the H.264 encoder. Our algorithms to design the lookup table of parameter settings take fewer than 2% of the number of encodings required by an exhaustive search of all possible parameter settings and find parameter settings that offer high peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) with low encoding time at a given bitrate. Our parameter settings are fairly robust over different videos and bitrates. We focus on low-resolution videos at bitrates less than 300 kb/s. We compare the performance of our algorithms to both exhaustive search and a multiobjective optimization algorithm. Our parameter settings improve the average encoding speed over the default parameter setting of the x264 encoder on both PC and cell phone platforms by up to 37.4 and 94.1%, respectively, with PSNR difference of up to 0.3 dB.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. InterDigital, Inc., 9710 Scranton Road, San Diego, CA, 92121, USA

    Rahul Vanam

  2. Department of Electrical Engineering, University of Washington, Seattle, WA, 98195-2500, USA

    Eve A. Riskin

  3. Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Washington, Seattle, WA, 98195-2500, USA

    Richard E. Ladner

  4. School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, 14853, USA

    Sheila S. Hemami

Authors
  1. Rahul Vanam
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  2. Eve A. Riskin
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  3. Richard E. Ladner
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  4. Sheila S. Hemami
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Rahul Vanam.

Additional information

This work is supported by National Science Foundation under grant numbers CCF-0514353, CCF-0514357, and IIS-0811884. Preliminary versions of this work appeared in the IEEE Data Compression Conference 2007 and IEEE Data Compression Conference 2009. The first author performed this work while at the University of Washington.

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Vanam, R., Riskin, E.A., Ladner, R.E. et al. Fast algorithms for designing nearly optimal lookup tables for complexity control of the H.264 encoder. SIViP 7, 991–1003 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11760-012-0288-2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11760-012-0288-2

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