Fast Implementation of VC-1 with Modified Motion Estimation and Adaptive Block Transform

Michael Tammen, Mohamed El-Sharkawy, Hisham Sliman, Maher Rizkalla

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DOI: 10.4236/cs.2010.11003                

Abstract

The Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE) Standard 421M, commonly known as VC-1, is a state-of-the-art video compression format that provides highly competitive video quality, from very low through very high bit rates, at a reasonable computational complexity. First, this paper presents fast motion compensation methods. The four motion estimation methods examined are fast, three step search, varying diamond, and 2D logarithmic. These methods use less search points than the full spiral scan used in the VC-1 reference software, which allows for faster motion estimation. Second, this paper presents a residual texture based choice of the block size for the Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT). To determine the block size, data is examined after the residual texture has been calculated. This is in contrast to the VC-1 reference software, which uses calculations at the block level to determine the block size. The residual texture of each block is small and uniform, allowing for simplified block choices.

Keywords

VC-1, Motion Estimation, Discrete Cosine Transform, Video Compression

Conflicts of Interest

The authors declare no conflicts of interest.

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