Low delay H.264/AVC bidirectional inter prediction on a GPU

The H.264/AVC video coding standard introduces some improved tools in order to increase compression efficiency. One of these new features is the variable block-size motion estimation. Moreover, H.264/AVC defines different prediction structures which include bi-directional predictions and, more recently, the hierarchical one. These structures also includes new Group Of Picture patterns which outperform the traditional ones. In the literature, several techniques have been proposed over the last few years which are aimed at accelerating the traditional inter prediction process, but there are no many works focusing on bidirectional and hierarchical predictions. In this paper, with the emergence of manycore processors or accelerators, a step forward is taken towards an implementation of an H.264/AVC inter prediction algorithm on a Graphics Processing Unit. The results show a negligible rate distortion drop with a time reduction of up to 92% for the complete H.264/AVC encoder.