Content-adaptive Temporal Search Range Control Based on Frame Buffer Utilization

Multiple reference frame selection adopted by the state-of-art H.264 video compression standard offers substantial performance gain. The temporal search range control, as a consequence, is crucial for maintaining the coding performance with minimum complexity. In this paper, we investigate the relationships between the reference frame buffer utilization and the optimal search range. A content-adaptive algorithm is proposed to control the search range dynamically during the encoding process. Experimental results show that our algorithm can rapidly adapt to the video characteristics and effectively reduce the complexity with negligible coding performance penalty