Complexity issues in the introduction of High Definition in H. 264/AVC based videoconferencing

High definition (HD) is showing an increasing popularity not only among professional and high cost video communication systems, but also among consumer devices. The aim of this paper is to investigate the adoption of HD in H.264/AVC video codecs for videoconference applications, where real time constraints, like short time delay, must agree with low complexity and computational costs. In order to satisfy these requirements, the H.264 baseline profile is applied, with suited modifications to the mode decision process to reduce complexity and coding time. A satisfactory trade-off is obtained, that provides limited quality degradation and acceptable complexity reduction