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

Rahul Vanam, Eve A. Riskin, Richard E. Ladner, Sheila S. Hemami

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

3 Scopus citations

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.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)991-1003
Number of pages13
JournalSignal, Image and Video Processing
Volume7
Issue number5
DOIs
StatePublished - Sep 2013

Keywords

  • American sign language
  • Cell phone
  • Dominant parameter setting pruning algorithm
  • Exhaustive search
  • GBFOS-basic algorithm
  • Multiobjective optimization
  • Multiobjective particle swarm optimization

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