Entropy difference-based early skip detection technique for high-efficiency video coding

Abstract

Recently, high-efficiency video coding (HEVC) has been developed as a new video coding standard focusing on the coding of ultrahigh definition videos as high-resolution and high-quality videos are getting more popular. However, one of the most important challenges in this new standard is its encoding time complexity. Due to this it is quite difficult to implement the HEVC encoder as a real-time system. In this paper, we have addressed this problem in a new way. Generally, for a natural video sequence good amount of coding blocks are "skip" in nature, which need not be transmitted and can be generated in the decoder side using the reference pictures. In this paper, we propose an early skip detection technique for the HEVC. Our proposed method is based on identifying the motionless and homogeneous regions in a video sequence. Moreover, a novel entropy difference-based calculation is proposed in this paper which can predict the skip coding blocks more accurately in a natural video sequence. The experimental result shows our proposed technique can achieve more than 30 % encoding time reduction than the conventional HEVC encoder with negligible degradation in video quality.