H.264 Key Technologies Study

H.264 is the newest international video coding standard developed by ITU-T and ISO/IEC. H.264 greatly improves the coding performance due to the application of some new techniques. Compared with the H.263 standard, H.264 achieves better picture quality and about 50 % compression ratio improvement. Furthermore, H.264 employs the error resilience and network adaptability schemes to guarantee the video quality in error-prone transmissions. So H.264 will have a good application perspective in the video coding and communication areas.However, the computational complexity is largely increased at the same time due to the implementation of multi-frame and multi-block motion estimation. To reduce the complexity, in this thesis we propose an efficient inter-frame motion estimation mode selection algorithm together with an improved fast motion estimation algorithm. Experimental results show that compared with the original H.264 reference software, the proposed scheme can efficiently reduce the motion estimation time up to 64% with similar quality and bitrate. Also in this thesis, a novel intra prediction algorithm is proposed. Simulation results show that significant encoding time reduction is achieved while the degradation in video quality and increase of bitrate is negligible.