An Early Detection Algorithm of All-Zero Blocks in H.264/AVC through the Vector Operations

Abstract

Motion estimation (ME) and discrete cosine transform (DCT) are major two parts for H.264/AVC, however, these two parts occupy most of computational time. Several studies focus on the fast motion estimation (FME) algorithm to reduce ME computations and then to accelerate the encoding process. FME has been optimized but we cannot neglect another parts on H.264/ AVC; i.e., integer-DCT (I-DCT) / quantization. With this concern, we propose an efficient method through the vector operations to early detect all-zero block (AZB) before the transform and quantization on H.264. Experimental results show that the proposed method is superior to other algorithms in terms of the hit detection rate and the computational complexity reduction at the expense of insignificant degradation of video quality.