L-shaped segmentations in motion-compensated prediction of H.264

Playing the role of removing temporal correlation in video signals, motion-compensated prediction aims at the ideal prediction and eliminates the compensation. However, the block-based video coding infrastructure at present was not competent in exactly present the various shapes of moving objects in actual video. Contrast to that, an exact segmentation of coding area according to the actual moving objects in video is also not easy to achieve and will introduce significant computational complexity into the video coding scheme. Concerned with this conflict, this paper proposes a new set of segmentations of macroblocks, in which one macroblock splits into one L-shaped and one square segment. Experiments of this named "L-shaped segmentations" technique show that it can outperform the H.264 P-picture coding by 0.11 dB.