A New All-zero Block Detection Method for AVS-M Encoder

AVS-M is the latest video coding standard developed by China for mobile application, which promises improved performance close to H.264/AVC with lower complexity. In an AVS-M encoder, the most time-consuming component is variable block-size motion estimation. To reduce the complexity of motion estimation, an early termination algorithm is proposed in this paper. All-zero block detection is one of the common optimization methods oriented towards low bit rate video coding. Especially when combined with motion estimation, it will effectively reduce the complexity of encoder. According to the new characteristics of AVS-M integer transform, the threshold for all-zero block detection is derived and a new all-zero block detection method is proposed. Experimental results show that this new all-zero block method reduces the computational complexity of AVS-M encoder remarkably while the degradation in video quality is negligible