An efficient multi-reference video coding scheme based on multi-level calculation allocation

The mechanism of multiple reference frames adopted by H.264/AVC standard is an effective tool of improving the compressing efficiency. Due to the considerable increase of computations, it is very necessary to research more efficient methods for multi-reference motion estimation. In this paper, an efficient multi-reference video coding scheme is presented, which proposes a multi-level structure of allocating different calculation intensities to different regions following their subjective importance, to accelerate the motion estimation. The regions having more influences on subjective results are given more calculations to maintain their qualities, while the calculations allocated to the unimportant regions are minimized significantly. Experiments prove that the proposed scheme can dramatically reduce the processing time with a minor and acceptable drop of the subjective quality.