Low complexity based ultra-high quality video compression method for multimedia-centric internet of things (IoT) services

Internet of things (IoT) enables a number of embedded systems to interact for the purpose of various IoT applications such as home security, medical, smart surveillance, and etc. It is expected that the need of multimedia computing for ultra-high quality video delivery has further increased the importance of fast and complexity-awareness video compression algorithm under low-complexity and low-power IoT systems. High efficiency video coding (HEVC) is the state-of-the-art video coding technology that can provide powerful video compression performance under limited bandwidth conditions for transmission or storage. Although HEVC adopted newly advanced video coding tools to achieve a bitrate reduction of 50% with similar video quality compared to the previous method, H.264/AVC, these cause heavy computational encoding complexity resulting from inter prediction process of HEVC encoder. In this paper, we propose a complexity scalable SKIP/MERGE encoding algorithm to design a low complexity inter prediction. Experimental results show that the proposed method is much faster than those of HEVC test model (47.42%) and previous method (13.95%) in terms of total encoding time, on average.