MC Complexity Reduction for Generalized P and B Pictures in HEVC

Motion compensation (MC) is a critical component in terms of computational complexity and memory bandwidth. The MC complexity of High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) for UHD contents significantly increased more than that of AVC/H.264. This paper reveals and analyzes a feature of generalized P and B pictures in HEVC and introduces a simple and effective method for MC complexity reduction that can be exploited at both the encoder and decoder without affecting the compression performance. The proposed method bypasses the (L1) interpolation process when the (L0) and (L1) motion information of a bipredicted block are identical. The simulation results show that the time reductions of 14.5% and 6.4% for the encoder and decoder, respectively, were achieved for LD-B configuration without any changes in coding results. The proposed method was adopted in the HEVC test model as a non-normative complexity reduction tool.