An improved adaptive interpolation approach for H.264 As one important component in H.264 video encoder, interpolation of half and quarter pixels is also computational intensive. Compared to integer pixel motion estimation, finer interpolation provides better block match. However, this good motion compensation performance is obtained at the expense of increased complexity. Based on our previous work, this paper presents an improved fast and adaptive interpolation method that further reduces the complexity of video encoding process. Experimental results on typical video sequences demonstrate that the proposed method is able to increase encoder speed ranging from 10% to 22% compared with our previous work without any PSNR loss or bit rate increase.

A fast and qualitypreserving method for H.264 encoding using dynamic SAD maps It is well known that motion estimation is the most computationally intensive processing unit of the H.264 video encoder. Various fast motion estimation algorithms have been proposed to reduce its complexity. Generally, these approaches achieve speedup by reducing the number of candidate search points within the search window. In this paper, we propose a new method, which uses the SumofAbsoluteDifferences mapping (SAD map) to dynamically cache the SAD values and then reuse them for different block sizes. Experimental results on standard video sequences verified that the proposed method is capable of increasing the encoder speed by up to 15% without any loss in PSNR value or increase in bit rate. Due to its generic nature, this method can be applied in any fast motion estimation methods although it is especially effective in the full search motion estimation method.