An Introduction to High Efficiency Video Coding Range Extensions

High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) is the latest international video coding standard, which can provide the similar quality with about half bandwidth compared with its predecessor, H.264/MPEG?4 AVC. To meet the requirement of higher bit depth coding and more chroma sampling formats, range extensions of HEVC were developed. This paper introduces the coding tools in HEVC range extensions and provides experimental results to compare HEVC range extensions with previous video coding standards. Ex?perimental results show that HEVC range extensions improve coding efficiency much over H.264/MPEG?4 AVC High Predictive profile, especially for 4K sequences.

Fuzzy Based Adaptive Deblocking Filters at Low-Bitrate HEVC Videos for Communication Networks

In-loop filtering significantly helps detect and remove blocking artifacts across block boundaries in low bitrate coded High Efficiency Video Coding(HEVC)frames and improves its subjective visual quality in multimedia services over communication networks.However,on faster processing of the complex videos at a low bitrate,some visible artifacts considerably degrade the picture quality.In this paper,we proposed a four-step fuzzy based adaptive deblocking filter selection technique.The proposed method removes the quantization noise,blocking artifacts and corner outliers efficiently for HEVC coded videos even at low bit-rate.We have considered Y(luma),U(chromablue),and V(chroma-red)components parallelly.Finally,we have developed a fuzzy system to detect blocking artifacts and use adaptive filters as per requirement in all four quadrants,namely up 45◦,down 45◦,up 135◦,and down 135◦across horizontal and vertical block boundaries.In this context,experimentation is done on a wide variety of videos.An objective and subjective analysis is carried out with MATLAB software and Human Visual System(HVS).The proposed method substantially outperforms existing postprocessing deblocking techniques in terms of YPSNR and BD_rate.In the proposed method,we achieved 0.32–0.97 dB values of YPSNR.Our method achieved a BD_rate of+1.69%for the luma component,−0.18%(U)and−1.99%(V)for chroma components,respectively,with respect to the stateof-the-art methods.The proposed method proves to have low computational complexity and has better parallel processing,hence suitable for a real-time system in the near future.

A simplified hardware-friendly contour prediction algorithm in 3D-HEVC and parallelization design

After the extension of depth modeling mode 4(DMM-4)in 3D high efficiency video coding(3D-HEVC),the computational complexity increases sharply,which causes the real-time performance of video coding to be impacted.To reduce the computational complexity of DMM-4,a simplified hardware-friendly contour prediction algorithm is proposed in this paper.Based on the similarity between texture and depth map,the proposed algorithm directly codes depth blocks to calculate edge regions to reduce the number of reference blocks.Through the verification of the test sequence on HTM16.1,the proposed algorithm coding time is reduced by 9.42%compared with the original algorithm.To avoid the time consuming of serial coding on HTM,a parallelization design of the proposed algorithm based on reconfigurable array processor(DPR-CODEC)is proposed.The parallelization design reduces the storage access time,configuration time and saves the storage cost.Verified with the Xilinx Virtex 6 FPGA,experimental results show that parallelization design is capable of processing HD 1080p at a speed above 30 frames per second.Compared with the related work,the scheme reduces the LUTs by 42.3%,the REG by 85.5%and the hardware resources by 66.7%.The data loading speedup ratio of parallel scheme can reach 3.4539.On average,the different sized templates serial/parallel speedup ratio of encoding time can reach 2.446.

Reconfigurable design of deblocking filter for variable block sizes

Based on the flexible quadtree partition structure of coding tree units(CTUs),the deblocking filter(DBF)in high efficiency video coding(HEVC)consumes a lot of resources when implemen-ted by hardware.It is difficult to achieve flexible switching between different sizes of coding blocks.Aiming at this problem,a reconfigurable implementation of DBF is proposed.Based on the dynamic programmable reconfigurable video array processor(DPRAP)with context switch reconfiguration mechanism,the runtime flexible switching of two coding block sizes is realized.The experimental results show that the highest work-frequency reaches 151.4 MHz.Compared with the dedicated hardware architecture scheme,the resource consumption can be reduced by 28.1%while realizing the dynamic switching between algorithms of two coding block sizes.Compared with the results of HM16.0,by using a complete I-frame for testing,the average peak signal-to-noise ratio(PSNR)of the reconfigurable implementation proposed in this paper has increased by 3.0508 dB,the coding quality has improved to a certain extent.

Learning-based parameter prediction for quality control in three-dimensional medical image compression

Quality control is of vital importance in compressing three-dimensional(3D)medical imaging data.Optimal com-pression parameters need to be determined based on the specific quality requirement.In high efficiency video coding(HEVC),regarded as the state-of-the-art compression tool,the quantization parameter(QP)plays a dominant role in controlling quality.The direct application of a video-based scheme in predicting the ideal parameters for 3D medical image compression cannot guarantee satisfactory results.In this paper we propose a learning-based parameter prediction scheme to achieve efficient quality control.Its kernel is a support vector regression(SVR)based learning model that is capable of predicting the optimal QP from both vid-eo-based and structural image features extracted directly from raw data,avoiding time-consuming processes such as pre-encoding and iteration,which are often needed in existing techniques.Experimental results on several datasets verify that our approach outperforms current video-based quality control methods.