Complexity Aware Encoding of the Motion Compensation Process of the H.264/AVC Video Coding Standard

Advances in battery technology have not kept pace with other recent advances in mobile multimedia systems with the result that power consumption is a major concern. The computational complexity of video codecs, which consists of CPU operations and memory accesses, is one of the main factors affecting power consumption. In this paper, we propose a method that achieves good video quality while at the same time guaranteeing that the complexity needed to decode the video does not exceed a specific threshold defined by a user. We focus on the motion compensation process, including motion vector prediction and interpolation, which is the biggest single component in computation-based power consumption. We formulate the rate-distortion optimization problem and present an efficient method for decoder complexity-aware video encoding in the H.264 video codec. Our results show that our method can achieve up to 95% of the optimal solution value.