본 논문에서는 H.264/AVC SE(Scalability Extension)의 부호화 효율을 향상시킬 수 있는 방법을 제안하였다. 제안한 방법은 율-왜곡 최적화 기법(Rate-Distortion Optimization, RDO)이 적용된 JM(Joint Model)의 FME(Fast Motion Estimation)를 대상으로 예측된 움직임 벡터의 방향성을 고려하여 탐색영역을 결정한 후 적용적인 후보 나선형 탐색을 수행한다. 다양한 영상들을 대상으로 실험한 결과 기존의 예측 방식에 최대 80%의 연산량을 줄일 수 있음을 확인하였다. 이에 따른 화질 열화는 평균 0.05dB-0.19dB에 불과하며, 압축률은 평균 0.58%의 미미한 감소를 보임으로써, 제안한 방법이 매우 효율적임을 확인하였다.
This paper proposed an efficient algorithm to reduce the amount of calculation for Scalability Extension which takes a great deal of the operational time in H.264/AVC. This algorithm decides a search range according to the direction of predicted motion vector, and then performs an adaptive spiral search for the candidates with JM(Joint Model) FME(Fast Motion Estimation) which employs the rate-distortion optimization(RDO) method. Experimental results by applying the proposed method to various video sequences showed that the process time was decreased up to 80% comparing to the previous prediction methods. The degradation of video Quality was only from 0.05dB to 0.19dB and the compression ratio decreased as small as 0.58% in average. Therefore, we are sure that the proposed method is an efficient method for the fast inter prediction.
