Motion Estimation Based on Spline Interpolation in H.264/AVC Video Coder for Videoconferencing Application: Performance Versus Computation Load

The powerful H.264/AVC video coder involves a large encoding computational cost than the existing video standards due mainly to the motion-compensated estimation scheme based on a full search of multiple reference frames in the sequence. This strategy decreases the residual errors of the predicted frames and may improve the performance of the video coder. However a great number of computations are usually wasted without improving significantly the quality of the decoded video mostly in videoconferencing applications. To reduce the encoding computational load and preserve the performance of the video coder, this paper proposes to substitute the motion-compensated estimation method implemented in H.264/AVC by a temporal spline interpolation. Simulations on several test sequences show that important encoding saving times are achieved with a competitive quality of the decoded video compared to the exhaustive search of multiple reference frames in the H.264/AVC video coder.