Computational cost reduction of H.264/AVC video coding standard for videoconferencing applications

The performance of the most recent video coding standards is obtained at the price of a high computational cost. This cost is essentially due to the sophisticated motion-compensated estimation methods developed during these last years. In videoconferencing applications, we show that it is possible to replace the motion-compensated estimation of the B and/or P frames in the video coder H.264/AVC by temporal spline interpolation. The P-frames (respectively B-frames) are predicted with nearest close past and future reference decoded I-frames (respectively P or I and P or I). Simulation results show that, for a given bit-rate, the quality of the decoded video sequence using spline interpolation is equivalent to the H.264/AVC decoded video sequence with a very low cost in term of computational complexity.