Distortion-Complexity Optimization of the H.264/MPEG-4 AVC Encoder using the GBFOS Algorithm

The H.264/ACV standard provides significant improvements in performance over earlier video coding standards at the cost of increased complexity. Our challenge is to determine H.264 parameter settings that have low complexity but still offer high video quality. In this paper, we propose two fast algorithms for finding the H.264 parameter settings that take about 1% and 8%, respectively, of the number of tests required by an exhaustive search. Both the fast algorithms result in a maximum decrease in peak-signal-to-noise ratio of less than 0.71 dB for different data sets and bitrates