Complexity Modeling of the Motion Compensation Process of the H.264/AVC Video Coding Standard

Abstract

With recent advances in computing and communication technologies, ubiquitous access to high quality multimedia content such as high definition video using smart phones, Netbooks, or tablets is a fact of our daily life. However, power is still a major concern for any mobile device, and requires optimization of power consumption using a power model for each multimedia application, such as a video decoder. In this paper, a generic decoding complexity model for the motion compensation (MC) process, which constitutes up to 25% of the computational complexity and hence power consumption of an H.264/AVC decoder, has been proposed. For the model to remain independent from a specific implementation or platform, it has been developed by analysing the MC algorithm as described in the standard. Simulation results indicate that the proposed model estimates MC complexity with an average accuracy of 95.63%, for a wide range of test sequences using both JM and x.264 software implementations of H.264/AVC. For a dedicated hardware implementation of the MC module the modeling accuracy is around 89.61%, according to our simulation results. It should be noted that in addition to power consumption control, the proposed model can be used for designing a receiver-aware H.264/AVC encoder, where the complexity constraints of the receiver side are taken into account during compression.

Decoder-Complexity-Aware Encoding of Motion Compensation for Multiple Heterogeneous Receivers

“…It is worth mentioning that this work is similar to the model proposed in [40]; in both models, there is a weight associated with each number of complexity units calculated in a training phase. Firstly, the number of each CU is extracted in a training pool of video sequences during the encoding phase, and then each bitstream is decoded on the encoder side to find the best fitting weights for each CU to establish an estimation model.…”

“…Recently, an analytical energy consumption and decoding performance model similar to the model in [40] was presented in [7]. The model achieves a balance between the abstract high level and detailed low level based on the video bit-rate and clock frequency.…”

“…The main difference between the work in [26] and our proposed method is the components that have been studied. In addition, in contrast with the models proposed in [26] and [25], the model used in this thesis, based on [40], can be utilized in any desired implementation, both hardware and software.…”

“…Parameters are extracted and evaluated to determine their relationships to decoding speed and thereby to energy consumption. Nevertheless, the authors in [7] have only focused on complexity modelling of the H.264/AVC standard, whereas in this thesis a generic decoder complexityaware encoding has been developed based on the proposed complexity model in [40].…”

“…The computational complexity is directly related to the amount of interpolation performed on the decoder side. In our previous work presented in [40], a generic complexity model based on an algorithmic analysis of the motion compensation process is proposed which considers the influence of mode decisions and interpolation on the computational complexity of the decoder.…”