Rate-Distortion Optimal Joint Macroblock Mode Selection and Motion Estimation for MPEG-like Video Coders (MP-P8)

Author(s) : Hyungjoon Kim (Georgia Institute of Technology, USA) Yucel Altunbasak (Georgia Institute of Technology, USA)

Abstract : Rate-distortion optimization can significantly improve encoder performance in MPEG-like video coding applications especially when it is used in coding mode selection and motion estimation. Nevertheless, mode selection and motion estimation in a rate-distortion optimized setting can entail a prohibitive computational cost. In this paper, we propose a joint macroblock mode selection and motion estimation algorithm by employing a computationally-efficient, yet highly-effective rate-distortion model. With our extensive analysis on various video sequences, we show that the proposed algorithm provides significant improvements with a small increase in overall computational load. With the proposed method, we achieve 3.36, 1.91, and 1.75 dB PSNR gains over the TM5-based encoder on the average, at the bit rates 2, 4, and 6 Mbps, respectively.

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