Avoiding unnecessary frame memory access and multi-frame motion estimation computation in H.264/AVC

H.264/AVC video compression standard uses multiple reference frame motion estimation (MRF-ME) to enhance the coding performance. The required frame memory accesses and the computational cost of the MRF-ME, however, are very high. This paper proposes an approach which exploits the characteristic of a constant luminance macroblock (L-MB) to avoid unnecessary frame memory accesses and MRF-ME computation. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme can reduce about 43% of the frame memory accesses and 33% of the MRF-ME computation for low motion video sequences without any PSNR degradation and bit-rate increase.