HEVC decision optimization for low bandwidth in video conferencing applications in mobile environments

This paper presents a model and approach to select an efficient set of HEVC encoding options for mobile devices. The main goal is to reduce the encoding complexity without significantly affecting the quality of video conferencing applications. Video target bit rates from 100kbps to 600kbps were used within this study. Experimental results show that by carefully selecting the coding unit size, coding unit depth and to a lesser degree transform unit size, the encoder computational complexity can be reduced for the target bit rates while maintaining an allowable additional PSNR loss. Results show a 36.5% of complexity reduction on average with a negligible PSNR loss of less than 0.25 dB.