This article is part of the series Advanced Video Technologies and Applications for H.264/AVC and Beyond.

Open Access Research Article

Fast Motion Estimation and Intermode Selection for H.264

Byeong-Doo Choi*, Ju-Hun Nam, Min-Cheol Hwang and Sung-Jea Ko

Author Affiliations

Department of Electronics Engineering, Korea University, Anam-Dong, Seoul, Sungbuk-Ku 136-701, South Korea

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EURASIP Journal on Advances in Signal Processing 2006, 2006:071643  doi:10.1155/ASP/2006/71643


The electronic version of this article is the complete one and can be found online at: http://asp.eurasipjournals.com/content/2006/1/071643


Received: 1 August 2005
Revisions received: 5 June 2006
Accepted: 11 June 2006
Published: 30 July 2006

© 2006 Choi et al.

This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

H.264/AVC provides various useful features such as improved coding efficiency and error robustness. These features enable mobile devices to adopt H.264 standard to achieve effective video communications. However, the encoder complexity is greatly increased mainly due to motion estimation (ME) and mode decision. In this paper, we propose a new scheme to jointly optimize intermode selection and ME using the multiresolution analysis. Experimental results show that the proposed method is over 3 times faster than other existing methods while maintaining the coding efficiency.

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