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In the emerging next generation video coding standard Versatile Video Coding (VVC) developed by the Joint Video Exploration Team (JVET), sub-block-based inter-prediction plays a key role in promising coding tools such as Affine Motion Compensation (AMC) and sub-block-based Temporal Motion Vector Prediction (sbTMVP). With sub-block-based inter-prediction, a coding block is divided into sub-blocks, and the motion information of each sub-block is derived individually. Although sub-block-based inter-prediction can provide a higher quality prediction benefiting from a finer motion granularity, it still suffers two problems: uneven prediction quality and boundary discontinuity. In this paper, we present a method of interweaved prediction to further improve sub-block-based inter-prediction. With interweaved prediction, a coding block with AMC or sbTMVP mode is divided into sub-blocks with two different dividing patterns, so that a corner position of a sub-block in one dividing pattern coincides with the central position of a sub-block in the other dividing pattern. Then two auxiliary predictions are generated by AMC or sbTMVP with the two dividing patterns, independently. The final prediction is calculated as a weighted-sum of the two auxiliary predictions. Theoretical analysis and statistical data prove that interweaved prediction can significantly mitigate the two problems in sub-block-based inter-prediction. Simulation results show that the proposed methods can achieve 0.64% BD-rate saving on average with the random access configurations. On sequences with rich affine motions, the average BD-rate saving can be up to 2.54%. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the latest High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) development, i.e., HEVC screen content coding extensions (HEVC-SCC), a hash-based inter-motion search/block matching scheme is adopted in the reference test model, which brings significant coding gains to code screen content. However, the hash table generation itself may take up to half the encoding time and is thus too complex for practical usage. In this paper, we propose a hierarchical hash design and the corresponding block matching scheme to significantly reduce the complexity of hash-based block matching. The hierarchical structure in the proposed scheme allows large block calculation to use the results of small blocks. Thus, we avoid redundant computation among blocks with different sizes, which greatly reduces complexity without compromising coding efficiency. The experimental results show that compared with the hash-based block matching scheme in the HEVC-SCC test model (SCM)-6.0, the proposed scheme reduces about 77% of hash processing time, which leads to 12% and 16% encoding time savings in random access (RA) and low-delay B coding structures. The proposed scheme has been adopted into the latest SCM. A parallel implementation of the proposed hash table generation on graphics processing unit (GPU) is also presented to show the high parallelism of the proposed scheme, which achieves more than 30 frames/s for 1080p sequences and 60 frames/s for 720p sequences. With the fast hash-based block matching integrated into x265 and the hash table generated on GPU, the encoder can achieve 11.8% and 14.0% coding gains on average for RA and low-delay P coding structures, respectively, for real-time encoding. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Unlike camera-captured video, screen content (SC) often contains a lot of repeating patterns, which makes some blocks used as references much more important than others. However, conventional rate-distortion optimization (RDO) schemes in video coding do not consider the dependence among image blocks, which often leads to a locally optimal parameter selection, especially for SC. In this paper, we present a weighted RDO scheme for SC coding (SCC), in which the repeating characteristics are taken into account when deciding RD tradeoff for each block. For one block, the number being referenced by the current picture and following pictures is estimated and based on the number, we set a proper weight in the RDO process to reflect its importance from a global point of view. To estimate the number being referenced, we propose a hash-based method to approximate the results to avoid the complexity of direct search. Experimental results show that compared with the High Efficiency Video Coding SCC reference software, 10.1%, 14.5%, and 2.2% on average and up to 25.7%, 39.8%, and 4.6% bit saving can be achieved by considering weights provided by our scheme for hierarchical-B, IBBB, and all intra coding structures, respectively. Thanks to our hash-based design, the complexity increase brought by the proposed scheme is marginal. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

By considering the increasing importance of screen contents, the high efficiency video coding (HEVC) standard includes screen content coding as one of its requirements. In this paper, we demonstrate that enabling frame level block searching in HEVC can significantly improve coding efficiency on screen contents. We propose a hash-based block matching scheme for the intra block copy mode and the motion estimation process, which enables frame level block searching in HEVC without changing the HEVC syntaxes. In the proposed scheme, the blocks sharing the same hash values with the current block are selected as prediction candidates. Then the hash-based block selection is employed to select the best candidates. To achieve the best coding efficiency, the rate distortion optimization is further employed to improve the proposed scheme by balancing the coding cost of motion vectors and prediction difference. Compared with HEVC, the proposed scheme achieves 21% and 37% bitrate saving with all intra and low delay configurations with encoding time reduction . Up to 59% bitrate saving can be achieved on sequences with large motions. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) provides superior coding efficiency than previous video coding standards at the cost of increasing encoding complexity. The complexity increase of motion estimation (ME) procedure is rather significant, especially when considering the complicated partitioning structure of HEVC. To fully exploit the coding efficiency brought by HEVC requires a huge amount of computations. In this paper, we analyze the ME structure in HEVC and propose a parallel framework to decouple ME for different partitions on many-core processors. Based on local parallel method (LPM), we first use the directed acyclic graph (DAG)-based order to parallelize coding tree units (CTUs) and adopt improved LPM (ILPM) within each CTU (DAGILPM), which exploits the CTU-level and prediction unit (PU)-level parallelism. Then, we find that there exist completely independent PUs (CIPUs) and partially independent PUs (PIPUs). When the degree of parallelism (DP) is smaller than the maximum DP of DAGILPM, we process the CIPUs and PIPUs, which further increases the DP. The data dependencies and coding efficiency stay the same as LPM. Experiments show that on a 64-core system, compared with serial execution, our proposed scheme achieves more than 30 and 40 times speedup for $1920\times 1080$ and $2560\times 1600$ video sequences, respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]