A receiver aware H.264/AVC encoder for decoder complexity control in mobile applications. Issue 3 (March 2017)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Semsarzadeh, Mehdi; Roodaki, Hoda; Aminlou, Alireza; Hashemi, Mahmoud; Shirmohammadi, Shervin
• Is Part Of: Signal, image and video processing. Volume 11:Issue 3(2017)
• Page Start: 431
• Page End: 438
• Publication Date: 2017-03
• Subjects: Receiver aware encoding -- Decoder complexity modeling -- Complexity control -- H.264/AVC; Signal processing -- Digital techniques -- Periodicals; Image processing -- Digital techniques -- Periodicals; Digital video -- Periodicals; 621.3822
• DOI: 10.1007/s11760-016-0978-2
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 1863-1703

Abstract

Abstract Due to the power limitations of mobile devices, high-quality video decoding is still a main concern, because it quickly drains battery. In this paper, an H.264/AVC receiver aware encoder has been designed that (1) takes into account all of the decoder modules of a receiver, unlike existing RAEs that only consider some of these modules and are therefore sub optimal, and (2) is independent of decoder implementations and platforms. Furthermore, a decoder complexity controller has been proposed that reduces the complexity of different decoder modules, while minimum distortion is achieved. Finally, we formulate and solve a generic RAE optimization problem, and apply this solution to control the computational resource allocation at the macroblock level of a RAE. Our experiments indicate that the proposed approach can reduce the complexity of different modules by up to 10 % with no quality degradation. In addition, the average error of the proposed complexity controller is 0.8 %, making the accuracy of the system very close to 1.