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In HEVC, the effect of the RDO on compression efficiency increases while its computational complexity accounts for an important part of the computation burden. For H.264/AVC, zero block (ZB) detection has been used as an efficient scheme to reduce the complexity of RDO operations. For HEVC, ZB detection is different from the scheme for H.264/AVC because HEVC requires large transform sizes, 16 16 and 32 32. The increased transform size increases the complexity of ZB detection. It also decreases the accuracy of ZB detection because the variance among the quantized DCT coefficients increases and consequently the possibility of a block to be a ZB also increases even when not all of the quantized coefficients are equal to zero. For effective ZB detection of 16 16 and 32 32 blocks, this paper proposes a new ZB detection algorithm in which the DC components of the Hadamard coefficients are transformed again by Hadamard basis functions for 16 16 and 32 32 blocks and the results are compared with a predefined threshold. To reduce the computational complexity, the upper-bound of the SAD (or SATD) is defined and the Hadamard threshold is then tested only for the blocks with the SAD (or SATD) smaller than the upper-bound. Experimental results show that the proposed ZB detection reduces the computational complexity of RDO by about 40% with a negligible degradation of the RD performance.Index Terms-HEVC, RDO, zero block detection, pseudo-zero block, SATD upper-bound.

The Sustainable Development Goals have refocused attention on ways of providing external finance to support development. Because they have different motivations and work through different modalities, remittances, foreign direct investment (FDI), and official development assistance may be expected to have different consequences for economic growth. Existing empirical evidence suggests that both positive and negative effects are associated with each source of finance. We use both a dynamic panel model and a fixed effects model to calculate the overall effects of each source of finance in isolation and taken together over the period 1976–2015. We include a range of control variables to allow for other potential influences on economic growth. We disaggregate the effects across geographical regions and income levels to test for heterogeneity. We also undertake a series of robustness checks. Our results suggest that FDI has a significant positive effect on economic growth, whereas remittances have a significant and negative effect. The effect of foreign aid is more ambiguous but is usually insignificant. The article offers an interpretation of the results drawing on ideas from the relevant theory.

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