Werkgemeenschap voor Informatie- en Communicatietheorie (WIC)
Abstract
The applicability of MPEG video coding can be improved by scaling the resource
usage, considering the desired application and the device that is going to be used. For this
purpose, we present a new resource-scalable motion estimation technique, based on a flexible three-stage process. This process involves frame processing in display order independent of GOP structures and approximation of MPEG motion-vector fields using multiple references. Quality refinements are optional, giving a flexible framework with a large scalability range (with a factor of 14) of computational effort and memory bandwidth usage, resulting in different picture-quality levels or bitrates. Experiments show that in high-quality operation, the new method slightly outperforms a full-search motion estimation with a search window of 32 x 32 pixels, although it is based on a recursive block matcher that has only a fraction of the complexity of a full-search block matcher. For e.g. mobile applications with power constraints, the computational effort can be further reduced by at least 43% compared to a single-pass recursive block matcher, at an expense of a slight increase of the bitrate (0.013 bits/pixel)
