An adaptive bandwidth reduction scheme for video coding

In high definition video decoders for the standard like H.264, bandwidth requirement is a critical design issue due to the overwhelming amount of memory data access. This paper proposes a new adaptive reference frame compression scheme to reduce external memory bandwidth consumption. An efficient variable length coding is proposed to compress each processing unit efficiently. Moreover, an adaptive compression mode decision unit is proposed to adaptively choose the best compression mode according to the image characteristic and bandwidth requirement. As a result, the proposed scheme achieves efficient bandwidth reduction with little image quality loss. The experimental results show that, at the same bandwidth reduction ratio the proposed algorithm achieves up-to 0.7 dB gain compared to the existing approaches.