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A new-generation video coding standard, named High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC), has recently been developed by JCT-VC. This new standard provides a significant improvement in picture quality, especially for high-resolution videos. However, one the most important challenges in HEVC is time complexity. A quadtree-based structure is created for the encoding and decoding processes and the rate-distortion (RD) cost is calculated for all possible dimensions of coding units in the quadtree. This provides a high encoding quality, but also causes computational complexity. We focus on a reduction scheme of the computational complexity and propose a new approach that can terminate the quadtree-based structure early, based on the RD costs of the parent and current levels. Our proposed algorithm is compared with HEVC Test Model version 10.0 software and a previously proposed algorithm. Experimental results show that our algorithm provides a significant time reduction for encoding, with only a small loss in video quality.

A fast intra-prediction method is proposed for High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) using a fast intra-mode decision and fast coding unit (CU) size decision. HEVC supports very sophisticated intra modes and a recursive quadtree-based CU structure. To provide a high coding efficiency, the mode and CU size are selected in a ratedistortion optimized manner. This causes a high computational complexity in the encoder, and, for practical applications, the complexity should be significantly reduced. In this paper, among the many predefined modes, the intra-prediction mode is chosen without rate-distortion optimization processes, instead using the difference between the minimum and second minimum of the rate-distortion cost estimation based on the Hadamard transform. The experiment results show that the proposed method achieves a 49.04% reduction in the intra-prediction time and a 32.74% reduction in the total encoding time with a nearly similar coding performance to that of HEVC test model 2.1.

Scalable video coding (SVC) has been standardized as an extension of the H.264/AVC standard. This paper proposes a practical real-time transport protocol (RTP) packetization scheme to transport SVC video over IP networks. In combined scalability of SVC, a coded picture of a base or scalable enhancement layer is produced as one or more video layers consisting of network abstraction layer (NAL) units. The SVC NAL unit header contains a (DID, TID, QID) field to identify the association of each SVC NAL unit with its scalable enhancement layer without parsing the payload part of the SVC NAL unit. In this paper, we utilize the (DID, TID, QID) information to derive hierarchical spatio-temporal relationship of the SVC NAL units. Based on the derivation using the (DID, TID, QID) field, we propose a practical RTP packetization scheme for generating single RTP sessions in unicast and multicast transport of SVC video. The experimental results indicate that the proposed packetization scheme can be efficiently applied to transport SVC video over IP networks with little induced delay, jitter, and computational load.

The scalable extension of H.264, known as scalable video coding (SVC) has been the main focus of the Joint Video Team's work and was finalized at the end of 2007. Synchronization between media is an important aspect in the design of a scalable video streaming system. This paper proposes an efficient media synchronization mechanism for SVC video transport over IP networks. To support synchronization between video and audio bitstreams transported over IP networks, a real-time transport protocol/RTP control protocol (RTP/RTCP) suite is usually employed. To provide an efficient mechanism for media synchronization between SVC video and audio, we suggest an efficient RTP packetization mode for inter-layer synchronization within SVC video and propose a computationally efficient RTCP packet processing method for inter-media synchronization. By adopting the computationally simple RTCP packet processing, we do not need to process every RTCP sender report packet for inter-media synchronization. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed mechanism by comparing its performance with that of the conventional method.