Region-of-interest based dynamical parameter allocation for H.264/AVC encoder

Since H.264 is a high performance coding standard in with high computational requirements, it is hard to implement on portable devices. According to the human visual system (HVS) research, human eyes can only focus on one area in a frame, which is called region-of-interest (ROI). This phenomenon gives a chance to code all macroblocks unequally. In this work, the ROI is detected using texture contrast and motion features. This detector uses a simple scheme to meet the low power requirement of portable application. After getting ROI, coding parameters, in terms of search ranges, and valid modes, are allocated in ROI and non-ROI respectively. This strategy reduces the coding complexity and keeps the visual quality. The ROI detector and the encoder are designed to be decoding-friendly and hardware-friendly.