Multi-level low-complexity coefficient discarding scheme for video encoder

Rate-Distortion (R-D) optimization technique plays an important role in video coding. R-D sense discarding (thresholding) technique can make great improvement on the coding efficiency. This work first proposes a multi-level coefficient discarding scheme, which is composed of coefficient-level (CL), block-level and macroblock-level discarding. In CL, coefficient-level R-D cost function is formulated and then CL discarding scheme is developed. At last, an effective implementation method is proposed to reduce the complexity of the proposed scheme. The experimental results show that our proposed multi-level discarding scheme can improve the coding performance of video encoder by 0.15db in average.